72: Bobby Tichy: AI and the future of Martech, a deep dive from SFMC to Braze

What’s up folks, today we’re joined by Bobby Tichy, he’s Co-Founder and Chief Solutions Officer at Stitch. Bobby’s a highly respected Martech veteran having spent over a decade working in technical roles for some of the biggest names in martech:

He spent a combined 6.5 years working on the Professional services teams at arguably 2 of the most well known companies in martech, Salesforce and Marketo where he was able to lead and support countless implementation projects for some of the biggest brands in the world.

At Salesforce he focused on Marketing Cloud technical and functional architecture. At Marketo he focused on project and program management.

In 2016, he left the in-house world and jumped to the agency side of martech working at Lev (a premier Salesforce consultancy) for 6+ years where he focused on Marketing and Enterprise architecture solutions. He also co-founded the In the Clouds Podcast, a show about Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Last year, after Lev was acquired by Cognizant, he co-founded Stitch leading their solutions team. Stitch is a new martech consultancy that specializes in Segment and Braze tech stacks.

Bobby’s an expert in all things marketing technology architecture, customer data platforms, customer journeys and Dachshund dogs as the proud dog dad of 3. Bobby, welcome to the show, pumped to chat today.

In-house vs agency

I’d love to start by getting your take on agency vs in-house, pros and cons and maybe get the inside scoop on going from SF to arch-nemesis Marketo a few years ago?

I think the, the easiest way to think about agency versus in-house is when I was at Salesforce and Marketo, you’re really just focused on the specific problem as it relates to the technology. So that might be implementing, you know, Salesforce, Marketing Cloud or implementing Marketo for a particular customer. But when we’re on the consulting side or the consultancy side, you’re really more focused on that customer. 

So what problem are we trying to solve? It’s much more about business problems and outcomes than it is technology problems and outcomes.

That’s probably the best way to think about it. Or at least the the biggest delineation that I’ve seen over the years, which the consulting side is so much more fun and so much more complex. It has each has its own challenges.

On the SF to Marketo switch, I think I I was so naive at that point I had no clue that it was like moving to their arch nemesis. Now it would be like going from Braze to Iterable or you know something along those lines. And it was interesting because I even remember at the time, once I got to Marketo, there were all these kind of rumblings. You never know if they were founded or not. But you know when Exact Target got acquired by Salesforce, was it, you know, who are the other bidders? And I don’t know if you ever listened to the Acquired Podcast, but there’s an episode of Acquired on Exact Target and Scott Dorsey goes through like that whole process. Which is pretty neat. And then he mentions the SEC filings, they actually have to disclose, they don’t disclose the actual companies, but you can kind of deduce who the other bidders were. It’s kind of neat to go through.

But anyway when I got to Marketo, there was like all this conversation about Salesforce because the Salesforce and Marketo integration (at the time) was market leading as far as market automation platforms were concerned and the Exact Target and Salesforce integration was not all that great at the time. Now obviously that’s totally flipped, but at the time it was interesting because I remember my first two projects on Marketo and Salesforce, I would kind of throw Exact Target under the bus a little bit with the horrible integration they had with Salesforce even though they were part of the same company. But I I had no idea to your point kind of like the political elements of my switch at the time.

Switching platform expertise, from SFMC to Marketo to Braze

So you went from SFMC to Marketo before going back to a SFMC focused agency but now you’ve left both platforms and at Stitch you guys focus on Segment + Braze. Did you play around with Braze before joining?

(At Lev) we had a couple of large enterprise media entertainment customers that were leveraging both Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Braze and so they would use SFMC for journey orchestration and e-mail and then Braze for mobile because it’s the mobile capabilities were so much better. The UI is a little bit better too, especially for marketers. And so that was our first introduction to that platform and then as as we were leaving Lev and trying to figure out what we were going to do next.

Everyone that we talked to, people from Movable Inc, people from Salesforce, you know sales leaders there and other people in the Martech ecosystem, all of them were saying like Braze was really where a lot of the marketers were going because it combined a lot of what we all loved about Martech, which was the advanced use cases, the power of the data. But combined all that with better usability, more real time, better mobile capability. So it just seemed like a perfect marriage of what we had experience in, but then also what was up and coming?

How would you differentiate the companies that use Braze versus Marketo or SFMC?

These are broad strokes, so they’re not specific or like universal comments. But I think the number one thing that we’ve seen for folks who are using Braze is those teams are typically more innovative and fast moving where they’re relying on marketers to build out campaigns and be in the tool every day and where they they understand. I think the other area of that too is they have the best understanding of their data. So what’s really awesome about Braze is this, this real time or event based architecture but also the the ability to to layer in some of those things.

One thing that we always came up against whether it was at Marketo or Salesforce Marketing Cloud was we don’t want to bring in all of our PII into the platform. And so you started to see like Movable Inc does a really good job of this, of being able to combine multiple different data sets and then just put to like push out a piece of content or copy that is personalized. But Movable Inc doesn’t require that PII, It’s just based on these integrations that are happening in real time and with Braze we can do something very similar right where I can call out to my Snowflake instance at the time of an e-mail send and I don’t have to bring that PII into the platform, but I can still populate the PII and the e-mail. So these things that are are really fast-paced and moving.

I think the area where Marketo is great is on the B2B side. We always saw a lot of customers migrate off of Marketo to whether it was SFMC or Braze because they’re trying to use it for B2C campaigns or for high volume campaigns.

Implementating Marketo at Tesla

The one example I always like to use, and this is years ago, but I was on the team that was implementing Tesla at Marketo back in I think it was 2015 and they were launching their Model 3 and it took Marketo about 8 hours to send about 2,000,000 emails. And so obviously I’m sure that’s changed, you know being seven years ago, but at the time was a big deal. It took forever, right? And especially coming from Exact Target, which was this unbelievable sending engine. I couldn’t believe it took that long. So suffice to say that was a bit of an e...