Podcast: How to Enhance Customer Experience with Martech

Subscribe to the Growth Colony Podcast on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | Stitcher | Acast | Pocket Casts | Breaker | TuneIn

Episode topic: How AWS Approaches Martech 

In this episode, host Shahin Hoda chats with Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations at Amazon Web Services, about how marketers should approach their martech strategy to drive revenue and higher ROI on their investments.

Darrell starts by advising marketers to begin with their objectives and work backwards to discover the martech they need to create a great customer experience. He also talks about why marketers should take the education provided by martech vendors with a pinch of salt and that listening to sales might not always be the right way to go.

During the conversation, Darrell drops many golden nuggets about customer experience, managing data and ways to prioritise marketing projects. He concludes by advising marketers to practice writing content as much as possible to achieve clarity of thought and vision.

This episode’s guest: 

Conversation segments on this episode:

Resources mentioned on this episode:

• Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy - Book recommended by Darrell
• Sara McNamara - Influencer followed by Darrell
• Jon Miler - Influencer followed by Darrell 
• Seth Godin - Influencer followed by Darrell
• Ann Handley - Influencer followed by Darrell

About the Growth Colony Podcast

On this podcast, you'll be hearing from B2B founders, CMOs, marketing & sales leaders about their successes, failures, what is working for them today in the B2B marketing world and everything in between.

Produced by Shahin Hoda & Alexander Hipwell, from xGrowth

Get in touch!

We would love to get your questions, ideas and feedback about Growth Colony, email podcast@xgrowth.com.au

Episode Full Transcript:

Shahin Hoda  Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode. I'm Shahin Hoda with xGrowth. And today, I'm talking to Darrell Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations at AWS about how you can become laser focused on customer experience leveraging your martech, and how Darrell does that at AWS? Let's dive in Darryl. Thanks for coming on the pod man.

Darrell Alfonso  Yeah, absolutely. Always happy to talk about all things marketing. Let's get into it. Thanks for having me.

Shahin Hoda  Let's do it. I want to start with mistakes. I want to start talking about you know, what do you see being kind of the number one mistake marketers make when it comes to martech?

Darrell Alfonso  Yeah, the number one strategy or the number one problem, and I already kind of give it away, the number one problem that I see is where marketers let technology drive strategy. And they don't let strategy drive the technology. And that is such a very common pitfall to fall into. Because we have a lot of cool stuff that we like to work with. And we like to try out. Your average, like marketing automation platform, for example, we'll have 40 to 50 features and different things that you can actually in tactics that you can actually try.

Darrell Alfonso  And it's so often that marketers will make their entire roadmap, you know, implement features one through 15.,right,? Rather than getting down to what really matters. And you know, this solves for this. And by the way, what ends up happening is, you end up getting to a place where you weren't really sure if that's where you wanted to go in the first place, right? And I think that's a big problem. The way to solve for this is you want to, you know, start with your goals and objectives.

Darrell Alfonso  And then this is something that we do at Amazon, and it's called work backwards. So you work backwards from your key goals and objectives. And for each customer touch point, you figure out what type of technology you need to create the best customer experience possible. And in that way, that's really how you let strategy drive technology and not the other way around.

Shahin Hoda  Got it? I want to I want to kind of dig a little bit deeper into the approach that you take later on, that you you talked about kind of working backwards. But you know, why do you think that is? Like why do you think that marketers kind of start with a tool and let that drive the strategy? I feel like, you know, like, one of the things I feel is a lot of marketers learn with the martech providers. Like when somebody comes and talks about.

Shahin Hoda  They talk like, I remember when Bizible was talking about pipeline acceleration, things like that. I felt like marketers were consuming their content. And then all of a sudden their strategy is becoming aligned to that. And the martech providers also have the budget to kind of push out their content, versus you know, someone who's not a consultant who really knows what they're doing, but they're not necessarily venture backed. Why do you what are your thoughts on that? What do you think is kind of the reason that marketers get dragged into this?

Darrell Alfonso  Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of the problem. It's the martech vendors for sure. There, there has been a lot of gains, I think, and educational gains from the martech vendors, just because it created a lot of interest in learning how to get better, so that part's good. But think of it this way. Let's say for example, you know, let's say for example, you have your martech vendor, and the best solution to a problem is actually to use like a different tool than yours, either a competitive tool, or you know, something completely different.

Darrell Alfonso  It's unlikely that you're going to create a bunch of content to help people go and buy another tool and use it. You know what I mean? There's conflict of interest there and there's also like a lack of alignment around the goals for the martech vendor. So I think that's key, you're not really going to be getting objective, you know, unbiased advice, when you look to their curriculum of programs and what they're trying to teach you. I've always said, you know, what if a vendor is selling things like lead, nurturing, lead scoring, personalised content, etc.

Darrell Alfonso  That's all of the things that they're going to promote, and all of the things that they're going to teach you how to do as the answer to all of your problems. You know what I mean? I wrote this funny post on LinkedIn earlier, it was about direct mail, and how a direct mail vendor would basically say, "Oh, if you have a problem with, you know, getting meetings, send them a gift, if you have a problem with customer attention, send them a gift, if you have a problem, you know, landing enterprise customers, send them a gift," like the answer is always send them a gift.

Darrell Alfonso  And like, you can see how that kind of plays out over and over again when you're letting vendors teach you and letting vendor solve your problems for you. It should be the opposite. You know what I mean? Solve your, you need to figure out yourself how to solve your problems first, and then take in the bunch of information that's available, and then make your martech decisions that way.

Shahin Hoda  Yeah, I totally, the experience that I had with that was when COVID hit, and all the gifting platforms were like, "Oh, don't worry, we've solved this. You know, we send them an email, and they will fill in the form. And we will get their home address and we'll send it to their home address." And I'm sitting there I'm like, and they were very confident about it. right? I don't know, if you remember came across it. They're like, super confident that this works. Don't worry about it. I'm like, but really, and I went on Slack. And I'm part of a bunch of slacks, and I wrote them, like how many people have seen this work? And it was just crickets. Like, there was no one replying.

Shahin Hoda  So, you know, it's such a great, great example of what you mentioned, what about distractions, right? So obviously, one of the things that distracts marketers from getting results out of martech is that strategy component. But are there anything else like what happens that kind of distracts marketers from getting those results where there are tons of examples,. People set up a lead scoring system, and it just completely falls apart and it doesn't work? What happens there? What distracts them, in your opinion?

Darrell Alfonso  One of the biggest distractions is when you're creating marketing, to look cool for other marketers and also, to sort of try and get promoted, I think that those are probably the two biggest problems. Because your marketing should be centered around the customer. And a lot of times, it's not the flashy stuff, I think that really gets over. It's not the latest technologies or techniques that will get your customers attention. But I think that as a profession, that's what we all like to talk about. And what's interesting to us, right, as marketers. And this can be this can get quite meta, actually. But, you know, one of the other challenges too, is like, if you're learning from marketers that sell to marketers.

Darrell Alfonso  You know, that is itself, this self fulfilling prophecy of, you know, it's not really the best information, like you get kind of the latest and the coolest, and what's different and what's provocative, right? And that's one of the biggest distractions. So when people sit down, when marketers sit down, and they create their plan for the year, they want to have something spicy in there. They want something like, oh, we want to send them the best direct mail possible that's completely personalised. And, you know, or we want to send them this video that is, you know, super flashy, you know, whatever the case may be.

Darrell Alfonso  But if you like really look at it, we're not really sure if it's the customer they want to impress, or if they want to impress someone else, and I think that's one of the big problems. And that's, that's where we get the, that's where shiny object syndrome comes from, where you want the latest and greatest martech. And that's where, you know, I love how you put it. Distraction because that's the perfect word. There's creating value for the customer and educating them and getting them to a place where they find your solution as the answer to their problems. And then there's everything else. And I think that that's, again, like you said it's the perfect word distraction. You're distracted from that.

Shahin Hoda  Because here's what happens, right? A marketer goes and there's a new tool and they put a, they create a case study for it or they create a business case for it. And they're like, hey, we need this, because of these reasons, yada, yada, yada. And the business approves it, and they go and make the purchase. I also feel like when they make that purchase, the marketers kind of feel like, hey, I have to use 100% of these features, I have to like, fully utilise this tool, where really, you kind of need only 50% of it. The other one is, again, going back to the same word is distraction. Like, you don't need to do that other stuff. But they feel like they have to. What do you what are your thoughts on that?

Darrell Alfonso  It's opportunity cost. One of the, there's that quote that I really like, it's called the enemy of the best is the good or something like that, these things that we're doing, implementing these different features, trying to implement 100% or adopt, get 100% utilisation of a particular martech platform. It's not like it's bad. And I think that that's the part where we get we get lost and distracted, there's actually some modest benefit from doing all of these things. And that's why it can go on for so long, you know. Because you'll see incremental improvement, just because there's some value in most of the features.

Darrell Alfonso  Most of them, I think, are not for just complete nothing. But opportunity cost really comes to mind. Because if you're spending your time implementing a feature, that's not the number one priority for you and your customers and aren't solving the biggest problems, you're losing time solving for the other ones. You know, one of the things that we do at Amazon is we take a look at at certain issues. And we we list out, hey, what are the, before we even start, like what are our biggest, like a five biggest opportunity areas that we can grow? There's no tools, no solutions, no, hey, what are we using now that we're not getting 100% out of?

Darrell Alfonso  And by the way, I used to think like this, especially like earlier on. So you know, no shame to people that do that, You know, I absolutely was one of the people that took a look at my marketing automation platform and like, oh, we're not using this dynamic content feature, you know, how can we slide this in, right? So, no judgement. But I think we have to realise that when you look at problems, look at like the five key opportunity areas, list them out.

Darrell Alfonso  And then start to list out the solutions and how you're going to solve for them, and then bring the technology in to support the solutions. And that's how, you know, you're working on the most important things, you know. And people think that just because you have more resources, that all of a sudden this opportunity cost goes away. And it's  definitely not true. There's always opportunity cost for every company, for every professional. And it's by not focusing on the most important problems to solve, that's  where you get lost.

Shahin Hoda  Tell me a little bit about assessing these opportunities. How do you go about, you talked about at Amazon, you kind of identify these top five opportunities, how do you kind of assess what are those top five opportunities?

Darrell Alfonso  I think of it in a hierarchy of decisions and criteria. So you're evaluating on different measures. The first one is customer experience. And I hope that that people really internalize that there's, you know, it's a very common sort of belief that sales should be our number one customer. I think sales is one of our customers, and one of our important stakeholders, but the customer, the one that pays the bills, the customer is the one that we should be focused on at for number one. So customer experience is the first measure, and then it comes to business outcomes like revenue, right?

Darrell Alfonso  Revenue and pipeline will be the second measure of criteria, right? So if you're trying to prioritize your your opportunities, or big project, it's customer experience, then it's business outcomes. And then depending on your sort of maturity stage and like where you are, there's also like fortification long term, and fortification is making sure things scale, making sure things are secure, and making sure that your systems will support your business and your customers long-term. That's a little bit more of an enterprise concept.

Darrell Alfonso  Because I think that if you're, you know, like hyper-growth companies won't have to worry about security as much. But enterprise companies really have to worry about security, because they're always good at trying, you know, there's always these bad actors trying to ruin everything. And then comes efficiency. Efficiency is at the at the bottom, I like to say. Now, if you're a startup efficiency might go a little bit higher, right? It might overtake fortification, but that's the way that I think of it. Efficiency is at the bottom. So looking at a problem, you want to think about those four different criterias. And then also order your solutions in that way.

Shahin Hoda  Got it. So, you would go and say, hey, for example, there's an opportunity for us to do, I'm spitballing here, but do podcasting as a marketing channel. Well, the customer experiences, maybe we get customers to be more informed, their revenue is that we maybe have some inbound interest. Is that how you were talking about here?

Darrell Alfonso  Yeah, kind of, I think I think it would, I think it would start with, even before that, of knowing who your customer is, and then understanding if podcasts are something that they're consuming in that format. And it in that way, you know, what I mean? Do they want to listen? Or would they benefit like or do you have a more technical audience that would prefer to see visuals of actually how to code something, or actually how to put things together? Or would another format be a little bit better?

Darrell Alfonso  Still today, you know, one of the things that that we do at AWS is we host these open workshops and sessions where developers come and they see firsthand how to use the services and we get them set up. So that that format is particularly strong. So it really depends on your audience. So that's the way that I would think of it first. And then if podcasts are the answer, then look at, you know, the customer experience of the podcast, and then also like the potential business outcomes, which, you know, could be a little bit interesting, because podcasts are a little bit of that longer tail effort. But you know, it doesn't mean that you just don't try so.

Shahin Hoda  And I was, yeah, I was giving podcasts just as an example to kind of clarify things for both myself and people who are listening, how do you kind of see martech coming into the mix here?

Darrell Alfonso  The awesome thing about about martec is that in the same way that technology improves our lives, technology can improve marketing, you know. So today, we can talk to our family member, you and I can talk now, we're on opposite sides of the world, we can see each other, technology's amazing. I think that when you look at the emails that you get in your inbox today, from brands like Amazon, like Netflix, you see incredibly personalised emails, you know. Emails that look like they're made just for you. And that's how we use technology to improve marketing, right?

Darrell Alfonso  You look at, hey, what do customers really want? And how can you use technology to make that happen? And by the way, this is a concept that I've been thinking about recently. And it's kind of like, how do you know? Or like, how do you know what a good customer experience is? And the answer to that is, when you look at something, you know, whether it's an email, whether it's a website, whether it's a post, you look at it, your feeling is, whoa, this is cool. You know, like, or, whoa, this is exactly what I need. And that delightful experience that you should be going for, you know what I mean?

Darrell Alfonso  So for those people that are sort of wondering, what do I mean, by great customer experience? That's it, you're capturing this feeling that customers have when they see your stuff? How can you replicate that? How can you do it over and over again? And  there's a lot to unpack there, like, how do you make that happen? Its personalisation, its timing, its marrying that with excellent aesthetics and visuals, you know, and so much of it, so much of it is based on on data, which is which I think is a big missing piece that a lot of marketers don't think about,

Shahin Hoda  Where do you think from a data perspective? Earlier, we had a few chats about AI and in machine learning, kind of impacting the the martech space? Where do you think we're going from a data perspective?

Darrell Alfonso  That's a good question. I think that it's not new, that our data is incredibly siloed and disparate among the different systems. I think that the first key thing that any martech manager or someone managing the marketing ecosystem or stack needs to think about is, how do you unify and synchronize the data across the entire stack, right? And one of the ways to think about doing that is you need to think about the activities that happen with your customer and in the business, and then the outputs that you are expect and how that improves decision-making.

Darrell Alfonso  So here's an example. Let's say a customer go visits a landing page. So that information needs to be tracked and sent into your, let's say, it's a marketing automation platform or some sort of, you know, content experience platform. That information that needs to be pushed into either your CRM or into a CDP write, normalise and format it in a way. So it can be compared against other similar marketing activities. That information then needs to go into either a data visualisation or analytics platform, and then presented up to into leadership.

Darrell Alfonso  And then that information needs to go back down, all the way through the tech stack, and then back to the customer in a way that's even more personalised. So connecting all of those data points, I think, are those data pipelines are incredibly important. And you can't really do great personalised marketing without that sort of flow. So I think that's the first thing that marketers need to get and if they don't have that, I think more and more, it's becoming table stakes to have that sort of connection. And even smaller companies without resources can do that with tools like Zapier and Workato.

Darrell Alfonso  So there's a lot of you don't absolutely need to have technical resources to achieve that. So I think that's the first part. And then I think there's this idea of making sure data is right and the same in all of different systems. That sort of unifying and normalizing data, I think is also a big part of it. Because if you are in, like, let's say you're in some sort of advertising tool, and then another marketer is in a marketing automation platform for email, and the data that they're looking is different and doesn't match up. it can create incredible problems. So I think that that's that that's also another big piece about data.

Shahin Hoda  Tell me a little bit about, when we were chatting, you talked about, hey, listening to sales is not, it shouldn't be the number one priority, right? And that goes against some of the stuff that some some other B2B marketers say, tell me a little bit more about that.

Darrell Alfonso  This is assuming, you know, where this comes from, is this comes from, I think, a spike in marketers that come into marketing, just to do advertising or social media, because they think it's cool, right? Or to come up with interesting creative ad campaigns without sort of the end outcomes or outputs in mind from those creative efforts. And I think that  there's a lot of reasons for that I think like Mad Men, and like the glamorization of marketing, as a creative endeavor, just for the sake of being creative, I think led to that sort of spike in number of marketers just liking to do marketing for the sake of it.

Darrell Alfonso  Now, I think that that's definitely changing. And I think that a lot of the marketing tomation platforms, and interestingly, because we've talked about this. Interestingly, the vendors are largely responsible for marketing becoming much more revenue-oriented. And I love that, you know. I think that anyone who's really studied business before, either now or before they got into, before they got a job, have this innate understanding that you need to make revenue in order for the business to survive. So I think that now  that's changing a lot.

Darrell Alfonso  And, you know, today, there's still this number of marketers that say that sales is the number one customer and I think that has a number of problems. The first is it's incredibly short term. So you know, sales, again, no judgment, have these quarterly or even monthly quotas to achieve, and, you know, they'll do anything to kind of meet those numbers, even if it means unfortunately, harming potential revenue that can happen later on. So I think that that long term perspective is something that we as marketers need to bring to the table.

Darrell Alfonso  And then another reason another problem that that it could be is if if marketers may not know this, but sales compensation is an art and a science and it's something that is done iteratively over time. And, you know, honestly, when you first set out like, I created a sales compensation one time. In one of my past roles when I managed sales development, I can tell you, at the very beginning, we're just guessing, you know. We're just saying, Hey, I think that they can meet these numbers. And guess what, when you roll those out to salespeople, that's what they go for.

Darrell Alfonso  They go for those numbers and it works. Don't harm the long term business. There needs to be some separation between those short term goals and what's good for for the business long-term. And, you know, this is not some sort of epiphany. But whatever is good for the customer ends up being good for the business long-term. And we've seen that so many, so many times, I do think that, that marketing should absolutely talk to customers. At Amazon, we have these large voice of the customer initiatives, where we have people that just tuck talk to customers and survey them all day, and write up these expansive reports on what customers are thinking and what they're doing.

Darrell Alfonso  And, you know, it's one of the things I really appreciate about coming to Amazon, because of their, you know, extreme focus on on the customer. We actually have this, this this principle called the empty chair principle. And whenever you're in a meeting, there's an empty chair, and the customer is sitting there. And that's who you should be thinking about, like, is this the best thing for the customer? You know what I mean? Yeah, and I don't think that it should be different from marketing, you know, In marketing meetings, you know, have an empty chair, and that and save that for your customer. Because I think that'll bring more alignment and more direction to your decision-making.

Shahin Hoda  Got it? Now. I love it. I love it. Darrell, I have a couple of rapid fire questions I want to ask you, but before I kind of get to that, is there anything on martech on CX, that that we potentially I didn't ask or we didn't cover that you think it's important for us to touch on?

Darrell Alfonso  One interesting concept that I've been thinking about a lot is like, you know, for those of us that work in martech, you know, what does the future look like where are we going? I think actually, the people that work in martech have almost two separate paths. I think that there is, you know, one that's more of the business operator track. And I think that people, marketing operations, and martech managers today, I think that they are really perfectly positioned to lead the marketing department in the years to come. Just because of their closeness to the data, their proximity to the customer, and all of the things that make really marketing really great.

Darrell Alfonso  So I think that there's that track. I also think that there's a huge opportunity for marketers to become even more technical. I think that we're gonna see a lot more marketing engineers, I think we're gonna see a lot more marketing developers that love marketing, but are tech savvy enough to build solutions and craft innovative solutions to solve for problems. We'll actually see two separate paths opening up for for martech marketers, and really excited to see.

Shahin Hoda  That sounds so cool. Yeah, marketing engineers. That is, sounds like a cool role to have. Let's dive into the rapid fire questions. Alright, the first thing I want to ask you is, what is one resource that could be, this could be a book, a blog, a podcast, a talk, whatever it is, that had a massive impact on you as a person, it could be both professionally and personally, what comes comes to mind?

Darrell Alfonso  This is an old one. But there's a book called Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy, whenever you talk to me, I think you probably can get a sense that prioritisation is something that's so like, meaningful to me. And I think that it solves so many problems that we face. And the concept of Eat That Frog is, if your biggest and toughest challenge, you should do it the very first thing in the morning, because everything will get easier after that, and it will make the most difference in your life. So that book by Brian Tracy is as I've always remembered that.

Shahin Hoda  Question number two, if you could give one piece of advice to B2B marketers, what would that be?

Darrell Alfonso  You might not hear this one often. It's improve your writing skills. That is, I think, the best piece of advice for marketers, for salespeople, for business professionals everywhere. Clear writing is a reflection of clear thinking. And I think that if you write often, and you focus on writing clearly and concisely, you know, I really think you get smarter.

Shahin Hoda  I really like that. And that's a big thing at Amazon, from what I've read and what I've heard, where you, I don't know if this happens at AWS as well, where you'd have to come to the meeting with a narrative and that gets distributed among everyone and they would read it. Does that happen at AWS as well?

Darrell Alfonso  Yep. Yep. So yeah, every meeting starts with 20 minutes of silence reading the, it's usually like a six-page memo or narrative. And, you know, once you start writing down the solutions to your problems or dissecting problems on paper, it's like the fog lifts. And I think that and, you know, one of the things why people don't do it often is it's really hard. So hard to write, you know. Imagine like starting a blog post or, you know, going through what I'm going through with writing. It's it's incredibly hard to write, but incredibly fulfilling and gratifying once you do so.

Shahin Hoda  Yeah and positive outcome. Alright, question number three, what are the influencers that you follow in the marketing space?

Darrell Alfonso  Let's see. I like Sarah McNamara she works in marketing ops in Slack. Slack/Salesforce. She's great her content is awesome. I also, I follow John Miller, who was a previous founder of of Marketo. And since went to Demandbase and CMO over a demand base, I love the stuff that he's doing over there. Yeah. And then and then your classic ones like, like, you know, like Seth Godin is one of my favorites. Ann Handley, one of my favorites. So yeah, also some of the classic I think marketing influencers I've always followed.

Shahin Hoda  I love it. Last question. What's something that excites you about B2B today?

Darrell Alfonso  You know, I like where social media is going for B2B. I think it's been taking strides. It's becoming much more creative, much more personal. It's just really great to see, you know. I think LinkedIn's own journey is a really cool thing to watch because a few years ago, the only thing that you post on LinkedIn or like, you either share articles, or you say, when you got a new job, or if you like, raised funding, and that's it.

Darrell Alfonso  And if you look at LinkedIn today, you know, yeah, there is there is some low quality content, but you see a lot of people just writing and writing their thoughts and talking about the industry telling people what, what they like about work, and you know, tips, and, you know, sometimes it can get personal. So I think it's very exciting to see that blend of business, work and life. I think that that is so great to see.

Shahin Hoda  That's awesome. Have you explored the TikTok side of, the B2B side of TikTok?

Darrell Alfonso  I love TikTok. I don't, so I did make an account for my dog. And, you know, got some engagement of just videos of my dog running around and doing funny things. I think it's so fun. But I think it's gonna get there. I don't, right now, I think it's it's very difficult to, you know, unless you are, the algorithm is so crazy right now, where it surfaces really the most viral most interesting things. And I think that only for, you'll only see like educational B2B content, stuff like that, is if you are really looking for it.

Darrell Alfonso  So I think that that's why it's a little bit tough right now. But, what one thing that I think that you're seeing a lot of is there's a lot more professional development, self development posts coming. There's a lot of how-to posts that are happening, you know, home decor, do-it-yourself, personal finance. I see a lot of that too on TikTok, and I don't doubt that B2B will soon follow after that. So you're definitely seeing educational content on TikTok, but I think it's a little early still for really good, like B2B content.

Shahin Hoda  Really interesting. Really interesting. Exciting. Darryl, love the conversation, man. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Darrell Alfonso  Yeah, a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.

Shahin Hoda  Absolutely. Thanks so much, Darrell.

Darrell Alfonso  Thank you.