Building Better CMOs and Marketing Leaders

Ariel Kelman, CMO of Salesforce: AI Agents in Action

Oct 30, 2024

In this engaging discussion, Ariel Kelman, CMO of Salesforce and former head of AWS marketing, dives into the transformative impact of AI in marketing. He reveals the importance of balancing quantitative data with qualitative insights for better decision-making. Ariel shares highlights from Dreamforce 2023, underscoring the significance of customer experience and advanced measurement techniques. He also discusses AgentForce, Salesforce's innovative AI platform, which aims to enhance customer interactions and streamline productivity through proactive AI agents.

45:26

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Episode guests

Ariel Kelman

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

Qualitative data, when combined with quantitative metrics, provides a more nuanced understanding of marketing effectiveness and customer impact.

AI advancements, particularly through platforms like AgentForce, fundamentally enhance personalized marketing strategies and streamline customer engagement processes.

Deep dives

The Evolving Role of CMOs in a Digital World

The role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) has significantly transformed due to advancements in digital tools and technology. In the past, success in marketing was largely dependent on storytelling and broad-scale brand communication through traditional media like TV and print. Today, however, CMOs must focus on creating robust customer experience strategies that leverage various digital platforms to engage with consumers effectively. This shift highlights the importance of adapting marketing practices to fit the digital landscape, moving beyond traditional brand-centric approaches.

Intro

2min

Insights from Dreamforce 2023

14min

Rethinking Marketing Attribution and Customer Experience

6min

Beyond Numbers: The Value of Qualitative Insights

4min

Transforming Customer Interactions with AgentForce

13min

Navigating the Future of Consumer-Agent Interactions

4min

Full transcript

It's easy to say you want your decisions to be data-driven. But as Salesforce CMO Ariel Kelman has learned, hard data doesn't tell the full story. Often, you also need to consider the qualitative.

"Let's say you go and do some executive event series, where you have 30 people come to each event," he says. "It's not like if we want to go draw conclusions from, let's say, Dreamforce, we had 45,000 people. You've got a lot of data to work with there."

Ariel previously led worldwide marketing for Amazon's cloud services business, AWS; his boss at the time, Andy Jassy, recommended that he call up a sampling of the participants in a niche program to determine its value to the company.

"Of the 300 people in this program over the year, we went and called up 20 of them and we got pretty consistent information: This part of what you're doing is super impactful to getting us to do more. This part [is] irrelevant, waste of time. This part, I don't care ... When there's areas of your business that you can't measure precisely, if you come up with three different imprecise, imperfect measurement techniques that are very different, then you can see it can actually end up being useful. If they're all aligning, your chances of them being statistically flawed in exactly the same way are pretty low."

Today on Building Better CMOs, Ariel talks with MMA Global CEO Greg Stuart about the transformative role of AI in modern marketing and Salesforce's innovative Agentforce platform. They also discuss prioritizing customer experience, the challenges of adopting deep learning models, and misconceptions in marketing measurement.

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This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm.