Engage21 Day 3: Conference Recap

We are already in the middle of a week chock full of marketing insights and every day is getting more and more insightful. On day 3 of Engage21, we covered stack and strategies for omnichannel marketing automation that connects the entire customer experience. We’ve learned from three marketing leaders how they’ve achieved success by using a CDP at the center of their technology and strategies to ensure the customer experience is consistent and friction-free.

The speakers for the third day were Kenny Kim (Chief Marketing Officer at Udacity), Neel Murthy (Head of Growth at Goldbelly), and Mike Berry (Head of Marketing Technology at Stitch Fix). The discussion was moderated by Josh Francia, our Chief Growth Officer at Blueshift.

Neel: “Both have their pros and cons. What I would suggest is thinking if you’re starting from scratch or not and if you have the technological expertise.”

Kenny: “At Udacity we have three go-to-market functions: one speaking to the individual learners, one work with enterprises to upskill their employees, and one working with actual country government entities. Salesforce is the lifeline for the enterprise sales team. And that has implications on how you build more context back there. On the consumer side, we’re heavily integrated with Blueshift. There are trade-offs around what you need to run the business? What are the priorities, the engineering team? Can they get things off the ground and how quickly can you stitch things together?”

Mike: “I would say that as time has gone by, the decision has leaned more towards integrating best of breed and away from monolithic stacks.”

So, everybody agreed that with the right technology team, a SmartHub CDP paired with best-of-breed technologies is the go-to solution for delivering engaging customer experiences across your omnichannel marketing initiatives.
About Martech and Stack

The discussion kicked off with everybody sharing their experiences of building a martech stack in a company where you either start from ground zero or you inherit it. That quickly led to a common question: what do you choose between monolithic type stacks or building a stack with a platform like Blueshift’s SmartHub CDP that can connect best-of-breed technologies? Is it better to have stacks that integrate with each other or go for a one size fits all approach where you have everything built out under one roof?

Neel: “Both have their pros and cons. What I would suggest is thinking if you’re starting from scratch or not and if you have the technological expertise.”

Kenny: “At Udacity we have three go-to-market functions: one speaking to the individual learners, one work with enterprises to upskill their employees, and one working with actual country government entities. Salesforce is the lifeline for the enterprise sales team. And that has implications on how you build more context back there. On the consumer side, we’re heavily integrated with Blueshift. There are trade-offs around what you need to run the business? What are the priorities, the engineering team? Can they get things off the ground and how quickly can you stitch things together?”

Mike: “I would say that as time has gone by, the decision has leaned more towards integrating best of breed and away from monolithic stacks.”

So, everybody agreed that with the right technology team, a SmartHub CDP paired with best-of-breed technologies is the go-to solution for delivering engaging customer experiences across your omnichannel marketing initiatives.

How Do You Align the Organization?

Technology, sales, finance are all big and important components of an organization. How do you align every piece and connect them to the customer experience? What are the speakers’ organizational strategies?

Kenny: “One is making sure the entire organization knows that growth is a company objective, not just a compartment objective. You may be responsible for the acquisition, or for branding, or you’re responsible for the full stack from acquisition to conversion, but even touchpoints like customer support or product experience have an impact on how the customer is going to view your brand. So it’s important to make clear we have a shared goal and make sure everyone is accountable for one top-line metric, and that everyone thinks about that holistically.”

Mike: “One of the things that I really admire about Stitch Fix is, we have these cross-functional initiatives that drive a vast majority of the work we do. We have leaders within different organizations who then get together with people across our data science teams, our engineering teams, our IT teams, our finance teams, to ensure that we’re all pursuing the same goal across these various initiatives.”