Mobile Matters: Salesforce | Every Purchase Decision is a Considered Decision

Stephanie Cox: I'm Stephanie Cox and this is Mobile Matters. Today I'm joined by Matthew Swayze. Matthew is the Principle of Marketing Insights for Salesforce.com, author, podcast host, multiple award-winning marketers, pioneer in the marketing automation space, and regarded as one of the top minds on the future of marketing. In this episode, Matthew and I talk a lot about starting his first business in fourth grade and how his passion for marketing helped him create the career he has today, why we need to stop acting like B2B and B2C buyers are different, and why he believes we should think of marketing as a game. And make sure you stick around until the end where I’ll give my recap and top takeaways so that you cannot only think about marketing differently the Implement it effectively. Welcome to the show Matthew.

Stephanie Cox: So tell me a little bit about your background. How'd you get started? What are you doing at Salesforce? How did this all happen?

Matthew Swayze: That’s a lot of questions to start off with. So let’s start off with my current position and we'll work our way back. So currently I am Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce. And really with that job entails is I kind of look at what is the future of marketing and both disseminate that back internally to help drive whether it be the product, strategy and then externally help make sure our customers and clients in the world at large have a better idea kind of what they need to be thinking about moving forward. It entails a lot of research for both helping internally with projects, and externally in my own research projects, writing, creating a podcast called the Electronic Propaganda Society.

Stephanie Cox: That’s fantastic, by the way.

Matthew Swayze: Thank you. I’ve got a new book coming out. Harvard Business is publishing that one, so I’m super excited and kind of humbled to be able to do that.

So then the next question is how did that all get started and how did it all get to that point? It's a long story and I was talking with somebody else the other day and they were like “How did you get there and how do we do what you do?” And I’ve thought about this question and it's like, you know, the career path how do we do this, and I think people need to realize there's people like me in every field and I just naturally came out of the womb with a really attuned love for this thing that we call marketing in business, right? I started my first business in fourth grade, I made my first flyers and I've always had businesses... I've got four of those now. I also co-founded a brewery in Atlanta and helped start multiple businesses. It’s just something that’s a passion for me and I think the other part is I just have a radical love for learning. I'm just so nerdy and dorky in this field that like, I just love to go down rabbit holes and find things.

In those things, it inspired me to do other things, I mean like the book I've got coming out is really based off of the continuation of the theories of Marshall McLuhan and a lot of people don't know him and in my opinion, he is probably one of the most prominent thinkers in the world. Well, he is the grandfather of media, he and his old professor Harold Innis, but I mean most marketers don't even understand what media theory is, and it’s stuff like that that you know that I really kind of jazzes me up and kind of you know helps me then you know, bring a fresh perspective and a unique perspective on this idea that we think of as marketing to everyone. So in long story short, it came out as just a natural love for the topics and just kind of keeps me going and then that's just kind of spurred a lot of other things. I had a start-up one time, way back in the day and then ran that for a couple of years. We were at an ASU Arbitrage play at a very interesting monetization model. More interesting, I don’t think the marketplace was ready for it at the time, so I lost a lot of money on that and then ended up moving from there over to a little start-up called Pardot. I was employee number thirteen, and from there grew that up, you know help start the marketing automation space and then was asked to write a book called Marketing Automation for Dummies. And ever since then I’ve been on almost all leadership teams for every one of those companies... I’m on the leadership team at ExactTarget, Salesforce just kind of the short of it.

Stephanie Cox: I love that you mention that people ask you, like “How do you get where you're at?” It's like they're expecting this secret recipe that you’re going to say, “Well, first I did this, and then I did this, so if you do these things you’ll be just like me.” I wish people would realize that there isn't one path to get at a certain job or career that you want especially today.

Matthew Swayze: Yeah and I think a lot of people talk about this in various different industries from different ways of life and I think a lot of artists that specifically musicians who are compared to the modern-day Michael Jackson and the response will usually be like, “Well, you know that that person already existed. I don't need to be another one of them. I'd like to be my own self.” So that's just kind of my point exactly on you know, follow your own passion, follow your own way. As long as you have an innate love for it and you're willing to go the extra mile because you enjoy it and we can talk about this later but there's a great aspect of how do you make social media work? And if you don’t honestly love what you’re creating, then you won’t constantly create, and none of those mediums will work for you. You know it all starts with you have to have that deep-seated love for what you were doing regardless of what industry it is.

Stephanie Cox: So it’s interesting you bring that up. Because that's like what one of the things I know I personally struggle with. I feel like I'm super passionate about what I do and sharing that but I overthink social media so much instead of just like throwing stuff out there and just sharing my thoughts and opinions on that and it's something I know I'm personally trying to get a lot better at.

Matthew Swayze: Everyone's going to get better at it, it’s constantly changing and it’s not anything that anyone’s going to be able to nail. I mean, there are some people that have nailed it and created such a massive following, like Gary V is an example right? He’s a madman but you know, I was talking to somebody the other day and they said: “Name somebody else that works for Gary V.” And I can’t.

Stephanie Cox: But he has a ton of people working for him, which is crazy.

Matthew Swayze: But here’s the point is he's the only thing of that brand, right? So red is him. There is no other person there is not a scalable model. There is no other person working with him that we also know that follows the same model right? It's his personality.

Back to the point, you know he loves that personality. He's very controversial. I try to stay away from controversy. I hate it and I accidentally get myself into it a lot of times and you know, I just hate those days.

Stephanie Cox: So one of the interesting things about the role that you've been on for a while is you have a nice background and B2B marketing from your history and being at Pardot, ExactTarget and Salesforce, but you also have this other interesting component, which is being a thought leadership role, you look a lot at what like a lot of B2C brands are doing so thinking about both of those because I feel like marketers today think B2B is a lot different than B2C and I'm just like we're talking to people, it doesn't matter if it's B2B or B2C. It's like humans. So what kind of commonalities do you see in how marketing has evolved today in both the B2B world and the B2C world?

Matthew Swayze: You hit the nail on the head. So I’ve done a lot of research in this field, and what I've been able to determine in what I write in my upcoming book, we need to really get past this idea of B2B and B2C. So let’s first off start with why we use these acronyms. We use these acronyms because we believe that we have different buyers and it one point in time buyer behavior was radically different heads marketing strategies were radically different and it really boils down to two basic works right, consider purchases and non-consider purchases. So we looked at B2C brands as things that were not considered and we looked at B2B brands as things that were considered, right? And so because those are radically different decision-making processes, it's in and how those decisions are arrived at, we had radically different marketing strategies. As we’ve moved forward in time, and as we’ve gotten to where we are specifically in time, we need to realize that all of those differences are erased. Once again going back to McLuhan, this idea of all B2B and B2C operate in the same environment, meaning they're all changed equally based on the media they interact with.

And this media changes the decision-making processes, and so if we start to think about this in the notion of all right, it's no longer B2B or B2C we need to realize that is the amount of risk that's inherent to the decision the individual is making that shapes their journey and all things are considered. I think this is the biggest thing that marketers miss both on both sides, is now that every purchase is considered and then we need to think about that is we need to look at this on both sides for a B2C consumer, right? The statistic is, well my favorite statistic is to point this is the data point, the search term for the best toothbrush, not best electric toothbrush, best cheapest plastic toothbrush, is growing at 100% year-over-year annualized rate that comes from Google. What we need to understand is when you just think about how people make decisions.

So this is the heart of marketing. So if a person is standing in front of a wall of toothbrushes in the local store, they are bombarded with a bunch of crap that we believe alter their opinions and in shape their decisions and to some degree that that may be true. But we must put that in context of how this person is making decisions because here’s the alternative: is that person going to believe that product packaging? Are they going to pick up that product and flip it over? Or are they more likely to pull out their telephone from their pocket and ask Google what’s the best toothbrush? And what we realize is that they want to find the answer on their own and they trust the answers they find from Google and so what we see is a radically new decision-making process. Now expand this one step further and it's not just that they find one answer rather that search is going to last for 70 seconds and go across four to five different websites. This is now how they’re making their decisions because they can and what we need to realize is the amount of risk in any decision is greater than the amount of time that it takes to ask a question to Google. So all things considered, all things will be considered because the risk is too great not to consider them, and the ease to ask a question to alleviate that risk is instantaneous. It’s .83 seconds to get that answer, that's longer than it takes you to reach to pick up the product packaging, right? So we need to think about these things and ideas because it’s all about the risk of the purchase and then that changes all buyers right? Because if you think about this from the B2B standpoint we can say all right, a person is on our site downloading a white paper. Most marketers aren't realizing that the person is not only on your site if they're downloading something from your site. The odds are also doing the exact same action from three of your competitors at that exact same moment because they're asking a question in there going to batch these answers together because the internet has changed that behavior and allowed them to do these things. Most people just don't put these ideas together. So to your point right, B2B and B2C, yes, there are differences in terms of how these things operate. But the reality is that we missed the boat and miss the major aspect of what is going on. And that is the media environment has radically changed every buyer. And it’s changed their behavior and most importantly their decision-making process. And that is what is changing what marketing must become.

Stephanie Cox: I know. It's exactly spot on. So to me, the first question hearing you dive into that comes up as how have we missed this mark? What do you think caused this?

Matthew Swayze: It's a really complex answer to prove that. So I hate to keep referring to the book I’m writing but I mean essentially that’s what this whole book was about was trying to figure this whole thing out. So here’s why I believe we missed it. I believe we missed it because we weren't looking for it, right? And so here’s the question that we usually ask, right? As a marketer, we say we say, “How do I be better? How do I make this effort better?” And that leads to an iteration, right? It says, “Okay take what I did and then how do I up-level that?” It’s an iterative process.

And that is marketing. It has been since it's been created right? It's an iteration. The problem is we've done is iterations without looking at the foundations of where they started and why they began and so if we continue to iterate on things, we fail to look at the reasons that that game was created. And so let’s take a step back. Putting a new word to this conversation is that it’s a game. So I believe that marketing is a game that is played given a specific set of scenarios and when those scenarios and that environment changes, the games that we play must change. And you can use and you can sub that word in for tactics and channels, whatever you want, but from the high-level schema, it's a game that we play. We've been playing this game where brands believe that we can change people's actual decision-making processes. We can convert people to do whatever we want them by these messages, these mediums, and these channels, these campaigns and strategies. And that was true at one point in time, and that point was called the limited media environment.

So the idea we have of marketing is specifically created in the modern idea of what we have of marketing during the golden era. It was the last golden era of marketing in 1955 to 1970-something, you know, this is when you know think small to BW campaign. This is the time that we have you know more lies with the admin series or Mad Men series that was that point in time. It was advertising in its heyday.

If we need to iterate, we need to realize that the games that that environment created were specific because of the environment, right and it was limited. Right, which means that the individual is living in an environment with a limited amount of media. When they only have a limited amount of media, their decision-making processes are as follows. You are going to have to remember things because you don't have access to media wherever you go. So you need to be top-of-mind because that is going to be one of the key places that people are going to pull from when they want to make a decision. You can go back to that individual in 1970 and they are standing there looking at toothbrushes, they are going to start racking their brain. They aren’t doing this consciously, right this is all subconscious. But they’re saying, “What do I know? Where does my vote sit? What’s the number one brand? Do I recognize this brand? Okay I recognize this brand, I trust it,” and that was the decision-making process at that time, but once again that environment was only filled with business media because there was a cost of creating a cost of distribution in a limited amount of access to it.

It was a very specific environment of how people had access to media, how they make decisions and how we as brands interact with that if we continue to iterate on it without understanding that fundamental foundation, we reach a point in time where we start reversing and those things no longer work and that's exactly where we are at today. And so think about this, right? A few foundational ideas: right message, right person, right time. Every marketer is going to tell you that that is apex, that's the goal that they want. That's the best thing that they can do. If they can do that, they're going to win. And that’s total bulls**t, and here’s why. The data actually supports this.

Think about this. So Larry Kim; I love Larry Kim, I love the brands he starts, the way he runs his businesses and the research he does. At Wordstream, which is one of the largest paid search tools to help brands manage this, which is Wordstream which is one of the companies he started. They’ve looked at the total spend which is billions of dollars of ad spend on Google AdWords that goes across the network. And they look at the results. The average conversion on any Google AdWords is 2.35% Now that means that the highest apex this idea of right message, right person, right time because we need to remember there are programmatic ads that are being displayed based on the intent the person is exhibiting in the exact moment they’re happening in the exact moment that question is asking right? And they are programmatically based on lots of data points. Google knows 57 data points on every individual or something like that crazy number. And so we start thinking about that and say wait a second. This is the apex. They will never be a higher apex of the right person, right message, right time other than this example. And we start to break that example down and realize that it fails over 97 percent of the time to drive any action. 97 percent failure rate on that idea. And then we take a step further. Alright, let’s go back three years. Do you remember when there used to be a right-hand side of ads on Google AdWords? They removed those, and why did they remove those? Two reasons. One low engagement rate. They received only 15 percent of all the clicks that AdWords had, meaning that 85 percent went to the top before they preceded search results, none on the right-hand side. And then the second was they wanted to make sure it was a better experience something that was consistent with mobile. And so we start looking at all these things, it’s like wait a second... We had that theoretical idea back in the day before the technology was possible. Now that the technology is here, we fail to actually say was that even the correct idea? In theory, it’s a good theory, and in reality, it doesn’t work. But yet we continue to try to do that thing. And then you follow that logic down with everything else. How did we miss this? We’re asking the wrong questions. We were asking how we be better? Not, why do we do this in the first place?

Stephanie Cox: So when you were talking about that one of the things that popped into my head was let's not we know we focused your point on like how do I get better at things? I'm doing but we also focus on hey, there's this new channel that just popped up. It's probably the Silver Bullet because someone was doing and they're doing well with it. It sounded like to the extent of, well I don't want to say chase shiny objects like a squirrel, but kind of like a squirrel. You know, there's something new let's go and now we're managing, you know, what used to be a handful of channels to an obscene number of channels and it's how do we even know what's working and what's not working anymore?

Matthew Swayze: But yeah, you added another dimension to this, which is completely true as well. We were looking at compounding factors as to why we got here. And so there’s two things, and I want to add one more to what you said. So one to back up your point. It's not... this has been proven right, we did the research in 2013 at ExactTarget, I think it’s one of the subscriber fans and followers pieces. These were one of the top-performing content pieces, content awards given to these things. And what we found was that marketers are the first to adopt any channel well before their audience is actually there because they’re trying to get those big wins and chase shiny objects to your exact point, right, we’ve got the data to prove it. Take one step further and it’s also because marketing is weird because if we see something out there in the world, we believe that people are rational and are following data to make their decisions.

Stephanie Cox: Correct.

Matthew Swayze: And we end up in this conundrum where your boss says, “Hey I see ads for this other product, I don’t see ads for our product. Make sure we put ads in this thing.” And you’re like, sitting there like you're a moron because that means we're spending money to advertise to someone who could never buy our product...

Stephanie Cox: Or never want to...

Matthew Swayze: Just because you saw a billboard from your competitor, doesn't mean that thing is doing anything for them. They could be making really bad decisions and you're just wanting to mimic them because you saw it.

That's the logic. We have to really understand a lot of these things which is all you know, you bring up the next point which is the measurement of a lot of these things, which is another problem we can dive into. That's another massive problem has been how do we prove value on the things that we do which is fair.

Stephanie Cox: Well that’s a great question because I think people joke like my marketing is working, but I don’t know which half right? There’s so much truth to that. Like I’m still mind-boggled by how many marketers don't actually measure what they're doing.

Matthew Swayze: You realize that quote came from like the 50s, right?

Stephanie Cox: Right, I know! When you couldn't really measure a lot of stuff.

Matthew Swayze: And we still say that today and the amount of tracking that we have, it’s pretty extensive. So let’s talk about this one for a second. This is what I think one of my more controversial things I like to talk about and I believe that brand and businesses have gone down a very wrong path and that path is believing it our lie is a good metric to value marketing upon. And it’s not. And so this isn’t just something I believe, alright these are conversations I've had with a lot of other people in this and Dominique Hanssens. He was one of the CEO of the Marketing Science Institute and he’s a professor of marketing over at UCLA. His quotes are “ROI is an efficiency measure, not an effectiveness measure,” so if we’re looking at ROI as the effectiveness of marketing, and it’s a value metric, it’s a value metric, it's completely off base and completely wrong and it leads brand astray and some very specific ways. So one of the ways he believes is it leads people to wrong investing because ROI does not have a linear return. Here's what that statement means. If you invest $100 and get a 20% ROI on that investment, then you say okay, that's great. I’ll invest another $100. You will not get another 20% Roi on the second investment because you've already gone into that market place already gotten the easy games. And so now you're going to have to invest more money to receive the same ROI on the second investment. Right? So if you follow ROI it leads to some bad investments because you under-invest believing that you will get the same things with the same investment in the prior. So that’s one of the problems.

The other problem is that it does not show value, right? It is a lagging indicator. It is not prescriptive. It is not holistic, right? So it says okay, you did one thing. Here’s one of my favorite examples. This is the dumbest thing people ask. What's the ROI on an email? There's no Financial cost to send an email. There is no Financial direct return from that email, right? These are things that happen in between the sales process. Sure if people click and buy something, but what do you do then and what does that mean? Oh great, somebody clicked, and sent that email to more people, is that even a good measurement...

Stephanie Cox: Well, some people think that's the answer.

Matthew Swayze: Yeah, and that’s exactly right. And it continues to forward, it’s not lying, it’s not prescriptive, it’s just a blinking red light. And most importantly, here’s what this means for us; and this is the most important thing for us, and when I say us, I mean you, me, and every other marketer that wants to be a marketer. We need to realize that we have the shortest tenure of any profession inside of business, right? The shortest. And so I’m able to make that claim because I did the research me and Linkedin partnered we looked at over eight years of data and over 15 million data points and found that marketers have the average tenure of 2.6 years. That is the shortest tenure inside of any vertical and inside of any profession inside the business world. You want to know how bad it is? You buy a hamster. That hamster is going to outlive your career at your current position.

Stephanie Cox: Oh my goodness.

Matthew Swayze: Hamsters have a lifespan of three years.

Stephanie Cox: That puts it in perspective.

Matthew Swayze: So here’s the problem. It’s not in a metric that our bosses or executives care about. It is no bearing on their executive decision-making process, right, it’s the ROI of life. It doesn’t matter, we have fifty more lives...we have more downloads. None of those things actually matter to them. We have to find a way to transition and translate all of our actions into something that can live on a balance sheet. This is what we have to realize is our efforts must be able to be translated to live some way on a balance sheet.

And there's only one way I found that we can do that and it's called a weighted pipeline. And to me, a weighted pipeline is how we must look at marketing’s valuation moving forward. It includes lifetime customer value and then opens up and shows a full diagram of the actual customer journey. It shows us current demand, future demand and more specifically it gives us as marketers accurate places to stay, “Here’s where you need to work,” and it starts to open up new ways of thinking. Let me give you some examples when I say new ways of thinking. So if we're to break out the customer journey, and we break it out into stages and I don’t care what you want to call these stages. I’m just going to use numbers, right? Let’s say that there’s four. And so we’ve got four stages and if we start to measure three basic things we start to measure the volume of people in each stage. We start to measure the velocity of how quickly they move from stage to stage and the efficiency right? How many people come in versus how many people move forward vs. How many people drop out.

We then start to see some very specific things and some very specific levers that affect revenue in radical ways. And in specifically, let’s talk about efficiency. If we have a four-stage journey, and we are able to increase the efficiency we need just 1% more people come into that stage and go out of that stage into the next, and we can do that across four stages, that is a 40 percent increase in total demand that is a 40% net-new increase in Revenue. You can't come up with a creative campaign that does that. And if you do it once you'll never be able to do it again. So here's the point if we start looking at holistic ideas and say “alright, all these things that we did, they’re increasing the efficiency decreasing efficiency increasing velocity decreasing velocity. We now get to have some very specific metrics. and then at the end, all this rolls into a revenue number.” And we can say specifically to the executives, “here’s the actual revenue that all marketing is currently owning. This is what it will deliver at what point in time and we now have that Revenue number that is owned by marketing that it helps the entire business organized and make better decisions, and that’s really where we’d like to go with this idea.

Stephanie Cox: And that’s the key with what you just said, is that there’s a revenue number owned by marketing. I am still surprised how many especially marketing leaders today, don't want to be responsible for committing and owning a revenue number? That's how you prove your worth.

Matthew Swayze: So I think some people might think about that revenue number as final revenue number, right. This is how many sales we created this month and that does create a very problematic thing because if you don't have control over all aspects of that what I'm talking about is a way to pipeline. So say here's the demand funnel or whatever you want to call it, the customer journey? Here’s how health it is, here’s how effective it is, and that then gives us, well it’s a weighted number. It’s a holistic view of things that we have full control over not just final sales. Because B2B brands, it’s difficult for B2C brands, I wouldn’t understand why they wouldn’t want to do that. It gives them a better value. I guess at the same time, it’s scary. You’re going to have to be accountable but with that, we also have another problem, which is most executives expect us to be able to produce short-term results at the expense of long-term profit. And that's another thing that we fate. They expect us to be these magicians that come in and they have this bad idea of what creative actually means, and we’re going to fire you because you didn’t come up with this creative award that won at cons that got us the big hit. It’s a horrible way, it’s an unsustainable way of running a brand if all you care about is big hits.

Stephanie Cox: If you can't tell him Matthew’s extremely insightful and enjoyable to chat with and that's why I'm breaking my conversation with him into two episodes. So let's dive into my top three takeaways from the first part of our conversation and then I'll share what you can expect to hear from the rest of my interview with Matthew in next week's episode.

First, we all need to stop trying to emulate someone else's career and their life. I know it's tempting for all of us to find other marketers who look up to and try to figure out how we can copy their career path and I wish there was a secret roadmap that could be shared and told you if you follow these exact steps, they'd have the same career success as them but what most people don't realize is that success is made up of a lot of hard work Talent often times luck being in the right place at the right time whether that's being employee number three at a startup called Pardot that gets acquired for 100 million dollars by ExactTarget and then later acquired by Salesforce, or finding the right mentor that then guides your career decisions. Success really comes down to finding what you're truly passionate about and working hard at it. Be yourself not someone else.

Next we need to realize every purchase now is a considered decision. consumers want to find answers on their own. The internet and Google have made this too easy for them now too. The media environment has radically changed every buyer and that means the risk in any decision and I'm talking literally any decisions such as buying a toothbrush is greater than the time it takes to ask Google about it. Think about that for a second. How many times do you search on Google before making even the most simplistic decisions? Buy-in behavior has changed it. So many marketers are marketing like it hasn’t. It's time for all of us to wise up.

Finally. We need to challenge ourselves about whether or not ROI is the best metric for marketing to be evaluated on. Matthew raises the ton of really great points on this topic about how he believes ROI is an efficiency measure and not effectiveness measure and that often leads to bad investments given the short tenure of most marketers 2.6 years, according to the research Matthew has done with LinkedIn. We need to be constantly showing how we provide value. His suggestion of a weighted pipeline being a better metric to show how marketing adds value to the balance sheet is something that all marketers should start using and make sure you check back next week., where Matthew and I talked about why everyone seems to have an opinion on marketing and why marketers need to stop being order-takers.

If you enjoyed this episode, then you're going to love next week. I'm Stephanie Cox and you've been listening to Mobile Matters. If you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe rate and review this podcast until then be sure to visit Lumavate.com and subscribe to get more access to thought leaders, best practices, and all things mobile.

Every Purchase Decision is a Considered Decision

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