51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

Transcript

Hi everyone, thanks so much for joining. We will get started shortly, but in the interim, I will share in the chat some of our upcoming webinars that folks can still register for.

Hi all, thank you again for joining. We will get started in one minute. In the meantime, I have shared a list of our upcoming webinars that are still open for registration, so feel free to take a look and we look forward to potentially seeing you on those as well.

All righty. I will kick us off. Welcome and thank you again for joining today’s session focused on gaining executive sponsorship for the AEP projects. My name is Ashley Echols and I am a Senior Strategist on 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ’s Customer Success Team. I’m really, really excited to be here with you as well as our presenter, Damon Austin, who is going to walk us through different strategies and techniques to gaining executive sponsorship for AEP projects. Again, thank you again for your time and attendance today. Just to note that the session is being recorded and a link to the recording will be sent out to everyone who registered. This live webinar is in listen only format, but do share any questions in the chat or the Q&A pod. I will be monitoring those throughout today’s session. Our team will answer those questions as quick as possible, and then we will also have dedicated time at the end for Q&A. Again, we are now showing kind of the most near-term webinars where registration is still open, and in the chat you do have a full list of the webinars that are still open for registration. I am going to turn it over to our presenter this morning, Damon. I’ll kick it over to you. Thanks, Ashley. Hi. Again, my name is Damon Austin. I’m also a senior strategist from an 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ perspective. Hello and welcome. So we presume or want to talk about how to develop some ideas in terms of using AEP and then develop executive sponsorship to help power those ideas internally in your organizations. Presumably you’ve got AEP, but this might be helpful or some of the content here might be helpful, even in the case that you have other 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ experience products and are looking for developing some internal executive sponsorship in terms of trying to acquire AEP. So without any further ado and additional preamble, let’s just jump in. On developing ideas, so there are a couple of key pillars in terms of coming up with ideas for using AEP. I think there are some fundamental pieces that need to be known, right? So and we’ll walk through those. Understanding the core features of AEP and RT-CDP, considering how those features can improve your processes or align with business goals inside of your organization, and then developing hypotheses for features, specific features like what-if scenarios, and then incorporating those into an overall thought process of how can these features and activities ultimately help, right? Hopefully some of this information gets you to think about, hey, what cool thing can we do? And then we tie that cool thing to something that’s going to be beneficial for your organization and your leadership, which therefore makes it a little bit more easy for you to get sponsorship and kind of move the ball forward inside of your organization. So what are the core features and capabilities of RT-CDP? Well, thinking about it, right, there’s a core governance framework. Hey, David. I’m so sorry to interrupt. I’m seeing that folks are not seeing your screen share. I can see it, so I’m not sure if it is kind of individual technical problems. But if there are, okay, Tom, thank you so much for confirming.

What might help for anyone that’s not seen is just to jump out and jump back into the session. I know that worked the other day for someone who wasn’t getting audio, but I think the rest of us are all good. Awesome. Sorry for those folks that are fighting teams. It’s clearly not uncommon.

Any case, so there’s data management, governance, federated data from an ingest and egress perspective, doing things in real time potentially, and then having things being sort of purpose built from a workflow perspective, data collaboration, all with sort of the underlying thinking around a customer life cycle, right? So we want to manage data. We want to manage our constituency or customers, and we want to do that effectively. Typically, AEP and RT-CDP are used from a marketing platform perspective, but it probably behooves some of the folks here to also think about what are the other operational aspects of data movement and customer data that could benefit from the overall feature set that RT-CDP and AEP bring to bear.

So with that said, right, what’s really important or key is real-time actionable profiles.

And so person attributes and behavioral data and their preferences turn groups of individuals or groups of customers into audiences in real time. And if some of the folks here are, you know, database related, which is probably the case, unfortunately, we don’t have a survey to understand what all of your roles are, but you probably are familiar with it’s pretty difficult to get profiles and data stitching all in one place. And that’s really where AEP and RT-CDP shine. So just that sort of base feature alone or base sort of support alone might get you to think about, you know, how can this be extended and not just from a marketing lens, but from potentially operational lenses. I’ve spoken to multiple customers who have sort of said, hey, like, the features here we could use in a bunch of different places, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be relegated to like a specific department. So, and that ties with the overall thinking of breaking down silos anyway, right? So we want to share data across departments, we want to share data across the organization, we want to be able to manage data, et cetera.

Unified profiles. So when we’re talking about unifying profiles, right, there is a schema, the XDM schema, we won’t delve into that too deeply, and identity services. So these are features, obviously, that are meant to stitch an individual profile together and give you a sense of, you know, what anonymous, i.e., someone who has not logged in or hasn’t created a strong identifier for themselves, and how we can sort of get that information from a session perspective or from a behaviors perspective tied to someone that we may know. So getting from unknown to known is, again, a core strength of AEP, and something that is ultimately helpful from, you know, not just a marketing perspective, but from knowing your customers, and then delivering personalized and custom content to the customer where they exist and where they typically live. Data governance. So the key here, right, is having strong controls over the data sets that comprise the customer profile or comprise data related to the customer profile.

And what we’ll talk about a little bit later is how data governance or this core feature from an RTCDP perspective can actually help in terms of building POCs or making an argument for building a POC, insofar as having strong controls means that you don’t necessarily have to create an entirely new environment, and you can keep data safe as you move forward to potentially create a POC for yourself or for your organization to move an idea forward.

Lastly, I want to bring up the idea here, and you’ll get this presentation after the fact, that we do have use case playbooks. So if you’re looking to come up with ideas that are either in a POC or generally speaking, you know, you have some sense of an idea that you want to pull together, there’s a repository of use cases and playbooks that you can sift through and look for similar situations and potentially use those as either additional artifacts to bring to your leadership for proof of concept, or you can use them for yourself in terms of how do you help spur on ideas or maybe even sharpen some ideas that you have. So you have a generalized thought about something that you want to do with the platform, and you might want to see what other people are doing. So, you know, these use case playbooks and repositories are available and can serve as a place to help increase your knowledge and refine some of your thinking.

All right, so now that we’ve kind of got some ideas on the table, we’re thinking about which features we may use, how do we validate those ideas and how do we push some of those ideas forward? So key to doing that is consider your organization’s goals, right, and then connecting whatever your hypothesis is around the features that you’re going to use to those goals, and then developing an overall impact story of here is how I think the features are going to or get our organization or department closer to the goal.

Now, this might be obvious to some folks, and it may not be obvious to others, but it is worth saying, right? So two big pillars of thinking in terms of how to go about creating change in or how to align what you want to do in your organization to the overall goals of your organization is simply by breaking down what are the two basic goals of most organizations.

Number one, can your idea help decrease costs and increase efficiency in some way? Or number two, can your idea increase revenue in some way? So if you can pin to either one of those two fundamental business pillars, you have at least you’re on the road for creating an argument for executive sponsorship. So yes, there’s typically a lot of back and forth, but if you really sort of cut down to the basic and the fundamental, right, which of these two things or can your idea affect both of these two things, then you’re really getting into the mode of being able to make a case for your idea and for your potential project.

Lastly, can it be measured, right? Typically, you want to have some sort of qualitative measure for how you’re impacting either one of these two levers.

All right, so simplifying the hypothesis and tying it to some of the features, right? Data integration and unification, customer segmentation, these are things that can typically decrease level of effort and provide some sort of benefit in terms of cost reduction, right? The better we are at doing data integration and unification, the faster we can move, the faster we can identify customers, the faster we can get marketing messages out, et cetera, et cetera, right? So on the left side, we’re dealing more in terms of reduction of cost, thoughts, and efficiency plays. On the right, personalization and customization and predictive analytics, that should more impact revenue, right? So the more we can have personalized conversations with our customers, the more that we can help them make decisions that will hopefully positively influence them and also positively influence the business. As well as predictive analytics, we can predict through lookalike models, et cetera, and potentially increase revenue in that way, right? Because we’re now targeting folks that are more highly propensity to conduct the behaviors that we’re looking for.

So again, can your ideas be quantitatively measured is sort of key across there.

So consider how your idea can possibly impact the organization, right? What are their goals and objectives? How can your hypothesis create efficiencies? How can your hypothesis drive incremental revenue? And what business objectives overall can you influence with your idea? Think about those things sort of in a broad bucket and basket, and then we’ll weave that down from into a POC. So we want to connect those dots, right? We want to connect those ideas that you have today and then start developing a roadmap, right? How are we going to use your idea to affect the overall strategy from a cost reduction standpoint or from an increased revenue standpoint? So let’s talk about developing momentum. So when we start talking about pulling together POCs or pulling together proof of concepts, right? I don’t want to use too many acronyms.

We’re talking about gathering data, pulling together some sort of proof of concept of your idea, and then we want to identify the stakeholders that that idea will potentially impact.

And again, I mentioned before that one of the core features is data governance. So we can think about creating sandboxes or development environments inside of AEP to siphon off and protect your idea from the overall environment, right? So this is not a new concept, right? Having dev environment or stage environment. But because of the speed and ease of use of the platform, most admins can quickly create a sandbox or development environment and then populate it with some data to allow you to kind of move a little bit faster from a POC creation perspective. So I know, at least from my personal history, in times where I’ve tried to pull together POCs, one of the hardest parts is where do I get some test data from? Where can I get a small environment to work in? And AEP kind of really makes that easy from, hey, we can spin up a sandbox relatively quickly. We can have some amount of controls and rights put in place, permissions put in place inside of that sandbox, and then kind of let you go running because you’re not really in fear of breaking a system because you’re sort of siphoned off. So at least from my and my own personal history, I think that feature in and of itself is really, really critical in terms of being able to kind of pursue your own projects. So another part of this, right, is classifying data, defining usage policies, and enforcing those policies. So, again, siphoning off data for test purposes and applying classification to that test data, defining the usage around that test data, and then enforcing those policies on the test data, right, is super helpful because now you have, again, a data-rich, potentially, environment where you can start to work through whatever your core idea is. And, again, that’s super important from a proof of concept perspective. And I think that the platform features in terms of being able to quickly identify and classify data and define the usage of that data makes pulling together an actual POC pretty quick and gives some of the lift off of what a normal, air quotes, air quotes normal data environment can sometimes look like. So we’re bypassing, hopefully, a little bureaucracy by leveraging the features in AAP in order to get our data set.

Here, again, using the features, right, labeling and cataloging the data, alerting on policies, privacy services, and consent management. So those pieces, while in a POC, may or may not take precedence or a high level of importance, you can think about using some of those, right, from alerts and policies perspective to help secure your POC and to really be able to make the case of, hey, look, I’m not messing with any data that’s really going to be impactful for customers or in production. So I can live a little bit more freely to push the boundaries, depending on what my idea is, inside of the sandbox or the dev environment that we’ve created.

And then extensibility. This is another key sort of data movement concept. Being able to tie to third party data and pull that in as well, right, inside of a sandbox or dev environment allows you to sort of create, again, real world scenarios without destroying data. So, you know, we’re it gives you, again, another sense of safety from a POC and ideas perspective. You can really sort of live in a world of, you know, real data without, you know, too much impact in production or out in the real world and really be able to sort of develop use cases that make sense.

You can create leverage that to create audience segmentation. You can leverage that to build out audiences, et cetera. Those are just some additional ideas, right? Testing audiences in POCs or building out segmentation in a POC really is just an additional sort of, hey, something that you could think about from an idea perspective in order to potentially bring that to executives and leadership and push sort of a narrative forward. Also critical is the reporting. So, we talked about making sure that you have some amount of quantitative information or it can measure the impact of whatever it is your idea is along the two lines of cost reduction or inefficiency or, you know, incremental revenue growth. So, the reporting inside of RT-CDP and inside of AEP allows you to do that, right? You can look at users. You can look at customer data. You can slice and dice things inside of the platform and really look to get a good quantitative number for where you think your impact is. So, you know, whether it’s growing overall customer sets, whether it’s being able to segment customer sets in a specific way such that you can help them grow or such that you can define some propensity around that specific customer segment, all of that is available and there are tools inside of the reporting, inside of the platform that will help you do that.

So, once you’ve kind of settled on a POC and you’ve settled on, you know, which features you’re going to actually leverage to help you get there in terms of creating your POC, you’ve got to also start thinking about what does that mean across the organization. And so, we get to a key slash fundamental term around change management. So, what’s change management really, right? Change management is the process of helping organizations maximize adoption while minimizing disruption. Those are fancy terms for saying change is hard and we need support when we’re to change anything inside of an organization. If we focus on enablers, if we focus on our overall message that we talked about in terms of tying what we’re trying to do to the core business vision of executives and organization, then we get to walking through the change management process a little bit more smoothly, hopefully, and we’re able to sort of deal with each stage of the overall change management process, which we’ll walk through in a little bit.

So, let’s talk about getting executive sponsorship and change management. So, step one is gaining the executive sponsorship that we need and having those conversations with executives.

So, one of the things that we need to do is focus on identifying which leaders or executives align with our overall idea. So, as an example, if you have a leader who has particular area of focus, like as an example, a customer loyalty director, what is their main focus, right? Campaign acceleration, perhaps, customer journeys, perhaps, managing their overall marketing team, you know, merchandising calendars, potentially customer growth, incremental customer growth, etc., those sorts of things. So, as long as your idea aligns with their overall mandate and vision, you should be able to come up with an alignment with that executive in order to push your POC forward. What is it that you can appeal to that is important to them and their job function that you can use to help move your idea and POC forward in alignment with what they need, right? So, the key is making the connection between what is it that the leadership and executive need is and how it is that your idea is going to deliver on those ideas. So, this is like a pitch framework, right? Create an executive summary with a pitch framework of who does your idea benefit, what are you trying to do with your idea, where marketing channel or within the organization somewhere will this have impact, how fast can you do it? So, give yourself some amount of project development pillars so that you can ultimately have that conversation of when you expect your POC to bear fruit potentially and then the overall how, right? So, these aren’t crazy questions. These are sort of basic almost journalism questions to get to how is your idea actually going to impact the overall executive thinking. And I think that that’s a critical step in terms of getting a pitch together and then having a conversation with the executive to get alignment on your POC. And once you’re successful with that, right, we go back to the change management bit, right? There are multiple phases of change management and each phase has different challenges and in reality part of the reason you’re getting executive, you’re trying to gain executive sponsorship and you’re trying to get alignment with an executive is to help walk you through these because change is hard and really connecting with the executive or the leader is the area in which the lubrication against some of the friction with the change that happens, right? So, is the vision and strategy clear? Is the engagement clear? Do you need to build a coalition? How are things that the executive once you’ve pitched and gotten their alignment will help you with, right? What is the capability of the overall development? So, this is actually now talking about scaling your POC, right? I think in terms of phases one through four, those are things that you should be doing on some, I mean, not to be too prescriptive, right? I think many folks inside of their own organizations can probably do much of that themselves and then four through seven are things that you start aligning with executives, building a team and then scaling your idea is typically how things work. Now, granted in your organization, things might work differently and that is ultimately for each individual to assess, but the point here is that the tool and tooling is available for you and ultimately as long as you’re aligning with overall business objectives of your organization, you should be able to move forward with creating the change that you want to see. Implementation and execution that comes down to how good is your POC? How well can you move things forward? And then you start to look at scaling and optimizing your overall idea so that it can potentially become project, I’m sorry, production ready, etc. Okay, so 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ has an ability to help from a consultative perspective and this is sort of the breakdown of how 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ’s consultative arm thinks about running pilots. I think POCs, especially in terms of on platform, should be thought about as pilots, right? Like your typical POC is really just proof of concept, so really just think about identifying, preparing your use case, pilot against the business, and then look to start moving into an adoption, monitor, and assess phase, right? So those are the scaling pieces of once you get past POC.

So I think we touched on most of this in terms of project journey, right? Define your project, map out your approach, try to get executive sponsorship, deliver your POC, and then try to scale it. It’s a fairly straightforward process and hopefully you’re going to be able to use the features in the tool itself from an AEP perspective to help you get there.

Ashley, I think maybe I saw some questions come across. I don’t know if you wanted to raise any of those or we wanted to bounce any of those. Yeah, so Dangan, I’ve been asking the attendees some questions in the chat and one of the first questions around kind of how critical is having an executive sponsor for AEP projects. We had Tom, who I believe is with American Cross, share that naturally it’s critical. However, he’s found that executives are asked to make an assertion that they will grow revenue or reduce costs by a certain amount, which makes kind of the executive a bit hesitant. He’s found that this specifically kind of happens when the sponsor is in marketing, but the funding is within kind of the different BU’s lines of business. So I’m curious, Dangan, if you have any recommendations on how to kind of potentially address when a defined or identified executive sponsor is a bit hesitant to kind of tie their name to an initiative or project that is kind of really being kind of airmarked towards revenue growth or other kind of revenue leaning kind of KPIs, cost reduction, et cetera. Any thoughts on that? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, again, small proof of concept or taking small bites really seems to help, right? So number one, right, there’s a hesitancy around, well, it sounded like there’s a hesitancy because there is a defined metric or a predefined metric or goal. So the question becomes, are there ways to define a POC to then get to create the trajectory to help build confidence to reach the specific goal, right, or a set of POCs? So as an example, if we’re talking about doing some sort of propensity modeling against the behaviors of the consumers, is there a way to do a couple of different POCs with propensity modeling, look at some level of result, and then group those results to show that, hey, if we do these six things or these three things, we get closer to 80, 90, 110% of the expected goal. So I would say taking bite-size POCs, doing smaller testing, and trying to pull the testing together to then show that you can have created a trajectory to get to a solution for the defined goal, right? So kind of break it up in pieces a little bit.

Absolutely. So Tom agrees that taking small bites is a great idea, but you need to have the platform licenses to do that, which absolutely, definitely agree with that.

Any thoughts to that, Damon? On the platform licenses? Yeah. So yeah, if there are limitations with licenses or anything similar.

Yeah. I think each individual platform customer, I can’t speak to what’s in contracts, et cetera.

But I’m sure working with representatives inside of 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ could potentially help. I just, we’re not as close to the specific relationships as account folks are. And that is customer by customer basis, right? Absolutely. And we do have a follow-up. So if you don’t have a license for the product, how do you build a POC on it? And if you don’t POC, how do you convince executives to buy the license? So from a licensing perspective or from a PO, if you can’t build POC on top of AP today, you don’t currently have a license. I would strongly recommend even creating sort of the, leveraging some of this material. And also there’s, again, I think we talked about use case libraries, leveraging some of those materials to show theoretically where the benefits are. To show, hey, we need real-time profile searching that would ultimately reduce, look at the overall processing time of pulling together an identity today in your current platform. And then say, look at it from a real-time stitching perspective and then do an analysis to show in real time, if this was done in real time, it would reduce X amount of cycles, et cetera, X amount of effort, which could be then used to do something else, right? Additional analysis on propensities, et cetera, et cetera. So you can take the feature set, right? Theoretically and then apply it against what you know are your current processing speeds, et cetera. And then potentially work to justify, licensing, et cetera. Absolutely. Yes. And I would also recommend definitely working with your customer success manager and or your technical account manager to really start to kind of build out, potential ideas for, proofs of concepts, options related to licensing, et cetera. Our colleague Katie Yoder has also shared a link to success stories where you can filter by product to kind of even kind of more improve kind of the business justification and the business case for any ideas that you may have. Yeah. Ultimately, part of our team is here to help you.

Your account teams are there to help you make those cases. So if you need to reach out, I’m sure there’s a bunch of hands that will be raised to say, hey, how can we help you have those conversations where you need them? Absolutely.

Cool. Any other questions out there, Ashley? No. No additional questions in the chat or the QA.

Awesome. So again, just as a quick recap, right? Like we want to just align the goals of the Greater Vision, develop an executive sponsorship, develop a POC, and then try to scale your POC.

And we can do that in the theoretical realm if there is no license, or we can do that in the real realm if you’re already on RTCDP and AEP. And with that, Ashley, I think maybe can pass it on to you for… Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you, Damon. And so as we prepare to close, we don’t want to share with everyone an overview of ultimate success accelerators. And so these are really designed to help you plan for value, enable your teams, and execute against your roadmap efficiently. Today’s webinar is actually an example of an organizational readiness accelerator where we’re focusing on a proof of concept and how to build and gain that executive sponsorship. And so within the organizational readiness category, it is really focusing on optimizing processes, governance, change management strategies, etc. In addition to organizational readiness accelerators, we also offer technical readiness accelerators. And so these are really focused on ensuring that you have the right foundation to succeed by supporting migrations, troubleshooting, environment reviews, etc. There can also be a lens of solution readiness. So as you are thinking about potential POCs related to AEP, technical readiness could also be something of interest and a value. Next, we have adoption and enablement. So this is really helping you to maximize product usage through best practices, coaching, and workflow optimization. And then finally, Gen Studio activation. So this is for our newest 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ product, Gen Studio for performance marketing. And so this is really focused on ensuring that teams are being set up for success with the deployment of Gen Studio for performance marketing. These accelerators are delivered as part of your ultimate success plan and can be scheduled with either your CSM or TAM. To align with your business goals. As we kind of get more into the Q&A portion of the event, there will be a quick two question poll that’s launching. We’d really appreciate your feedback because not only does this help to shape future sessions, it also kind of provides us with some additional topics that we can start to incorporate within the success accelerators. So we really appreciate any feedback that can be provided. But so as we are kind of wrapping up, if there are any additional questions that folks have, feel free to post those in the chat. And again, I will be launching the poll shortly. Let’s see.

Let’s see. So there is a question. So for publishing the success stories, customer consent is required, obviously, but who needs to put forward the case study and success story to 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ SI vendor or customer themselves? That is a great question. So we source our customer success, excuse me, stories through a variety of different sources. So it can come from either the customer, an 51ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ partner, also internally within our account team. So account director, CSM, TAM, TAD, et cetera. So again, those success stories are sourced from a variety of different sources. Next.

Okay. We have the poll up. Let’s see. Any additional questions? So I’m not seeing any additional questions, but I do have a question for you, Damon. Okay. This is something that I actually posed in the chat. So typically, when you are kind of providing consult to customers around securing the executive sponsorship, any kind of recommendations for when that should occur within the process? Do you do it early on? Do you wait until you’ve defined an idea and have a credible business case or option C, something different? Yeah. I personally feel like I’ve found a lot of success with option B in terms of being able to really create a credible opportunity for an executive to sign on. So the more pre-work that I’m able to do in terms of getting a dataset, getting a clear vision for what I’m doing with the dataset or clear vision at all around an idea, being able to create some level of predictive information or estimate around what the impacts will be, either from a reduction of cost perspective and from a revenue generation perspective. If I can go pretty far down the road of doing a lot of the lifting on my own, then it creates a no-brainer from a leadership or an executive perspective. In addition, doing a bit more of a refinement of your specific idea will also allow you to potentially find the right executive sponsor. So I mentioned it in brief, but you know, in larger organizations, you may have multiple opportunities to find leadership that align with your message. So it might not be in the same department or may not be necessarily the same vertical, but it will be a leader or an executive that has a similar, that has a vision or has a mandate where you’re bringing some version of solution or some version of help to help achieve getting to the vision. So at the end of the day, if you can do a little bit of refining or a fair amount of refining, you can end up with basically a better pitch or a more refined pitch, which will hopefully help lead you to the right leadership partner.

Awesome. Now, thank you for that. And I definitely agree with that as well. So I do not see any additional questions, but I am seeing some responses for the poll. So thank you guys so much. If there are no more questions, I think we can wrap up. Thank you again for joining us. As a reminder, the recording and the deck will be emailed for all registered attendees shortly following this workshop. Thank you again for joining and we look forward to seeing you on a future webinar. Thanks so much. Always love to give a little bit of time back because everybody’s always busy. Yes, absolutely. Thank you all.