Navigating the Shift to Customer-Centric Operations Amidst Competitive Pressures and Data Challenges

Matt interviews Sophie Crosby, Co-Founder of Paso Consulting, Former CMO at Ticketmaster, SVP of product at Salesforce, and VP of eCommerce at LiveNation. Paso Consulting, her current venture, builds and guides teams with marketing, insight and data expertise to improve customer experience and drive growth.

Sophie describes the possibilities of emerging technology, the power of progressive profiling, and how to establish trust as part of a modern marketing tactic.

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Key Quotes:

“A lot of people don't like change, and software and bringing in new technology is often about change. And it's often about changing people's roles quite radically, sometimes in an extraordinary way.”

“Marketing, for example, has changed arguably more in the last three years than it has in the previous 30. I'm frankly overwhelmed by the balkanization of communities and channels and platforms, you know, um, uh, what many marketers as well have relied on over the last decade, which is really third party cookies. And, you know, having to be able to stitch together data or at least understand audiences in a way that really makes large scale advertising spend much more efficiently. That's all going to go away. It's pretty terrifying right now. Customer acquisition costs are going through the roof. Everybody's being told AI is going to steal their job. So, why am I passionate about this? Because I know it's going to affect everything.”

“You enable this progressive profiling. I think that's a really important part of the marketers arsenal moving forward to start to really get deeper because as you start to look at the data processing capabilities that are now much more  available to marketers, not all companies, not all IT departments are making that available to marketers, but whether it's Databricks or Snowflake or Salesforce Data Cloud, the ability to actually store quite deep, resonant, important information, you know, whether it's a star scheme or how you do it about each customer, and then to be able to really serve them,  that's going to be super important, super important moving forward.”

“I think marketers are struggling with an enormous amount of information. Um, and often in frustration over the last 10, 15 years, they've gone off and they've got their own technology… It’s that data and all the other data from all the other platforms. That's what the marketer is desperate for. And yet they're really dependent on data engineers and data quality and data architects and teams that they don't have  who are quite rightly busy doing lots of other incredibly important things for the business. And so there's a real frustration there.”

“For quite a few years, I was going, everybody wants personalization. Everyone wants personalization. It's like, well, I do, but only when I want it. So there's an interesting thing here… being able to manage that balance, I think of privacy and personal is really important, but that friction thing. And it's trust, isn't it? And so allowing marketers to build trust with progressive profiling and showing that there is a relevancy and a timeliness.”

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Time stamps:

00:40 - What’s Your Identity?

09:16 - Building a really great product

13:25 - Taking advantage of new technology

23:39 - Avoiding data overload

35:59 - Personalization in the age of identity sprawl

44:29 - Quick hits

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Links:

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