Attentive's AI-Powered Marketing Platform, Driving Revenue & Personalizing Experiences | Keri McGhee

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #252 we welcomed Keri McGhee the CMO at Attentive, the AI marketing platform for leading brands based in New York. 

Attentive® is the AI marketing platform for leading brands, designed to optimize message performance through 1:1 SMS and email interactions. Attentive empowers businesses to achieve hyper-personalized communication with their customers on a large scale. 

Trusted by over 8,000 leading brands, Attentive is the go-to solution for delivering powerful commerce experiences for consumers with the brands they love.

Keri leads strategic global marketing to further build the Attentive brand, overseeing product marketing, revenue marketing, events, partner marketing, communications and content, and brand creative. 

Keri's past experiences include leading marketing at various start-ups and as a senior director at Zillow, where she led the B2B marketing team of 60+ people, responsible for strengthening partner loyalty and experience for 60,000+ real estate partners. 

She got her start in tech at Expedia leading both consumer and corporate travel marketing teams.

In this episode, Keri and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that her team at Attentive think through on a daily basis to build world class customer & employee experiences.

**Episode #252 Highlight Reel:**

1. Prioritizing the customer experience above everything to drive growth.
2. Why customer marketing & customer success should own your VOC.
3. How building trust from your users & customers drives sales & awareness 
4. Driving product adoption & utilization by showing customers how to use it.
5. Leveraging a customer journey task force to socialize opportunities & CTAs 

Click here to learn more about Keri McGhee

Click here to learn more about Attentive

Huge thanks to Keri for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring her work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & customer success space into the future.

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Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

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Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #252 -- w/ Keri McGhee, CMO at Attentive 

Adrian (00:00:00) - All right, guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles Podcast. Super excited for today's show, guys. We have a friend of mine, someone that I've known for many years now, and an awesome customer-focused business leader who's got just so many cool experiences at some major global companies joining us today. Keri McGee, CMO at Attentive. Welcome to CXChronicles Podcast. 

Keri (00:00:27) - Thanks for having me. It's nice to see you. 

Adrian (00:00:29) - Hey, thanks for finally coming on. Guys, I've been asking Keri now for a very long time. Keri, I want you to come on and I want you to talk to the CX nation, but Keri, before we jump in, why don't you introduce yourself? Why don't you take a couple minutes? Do the stepping stones question. You know, I always ask this at the beginning of episodes, but take a few minutes just to kind of tell the listeners, number one, who you are, some of the things that you did early in your career to get to where you are today as the CMO at Attentive. 

Keri (00:00:54) - Yeah, it's always a great question to look back and figure out how did you get here? It certainly wasn't a very goal-oriented kind of career leap for me, but I always started out like years and years ago, no matter what roles I had, one of my first like customer-driven roles I ever had was working at RAI. I'm a total cliche Pacific Northwester. I love the outdoors. And so like every good Northwester, I needed a good pro deal. 

Keri (00:01:17) - So I worked at RAI and it was one of those companies that like foundationally taught me, customer comes first, solve for the customer, right? And as far as like how many products you sell and making sure that you're first to market and you're making the most and that your gross profits are high, like it all was about serving the customer. And so that was instilled at a really early age. I ran customer service for a couple of their locations throughout Seattle and college years and learned a ton around just how do you really serve the customer? 

Keri (00:01:43) - And so that evolved into, as I went deeper into my career and started working for companies like Expedia and Zillow was really just having that mindset and always aligning myself to finding roles in companies where you really tried to solve for the customer's problem, like product market fit, solving for what the customer needed and putting their experience in marketing. We always say content is king, but I think just equally as important is customer is king. 

Keri (00:02:07) - So it's always kind of able to like open doors at companies through asking the questions, like what are we solving for? What is the problem we're solving? And like, how do we do that in the best possible way that serves the customer versus the company? Because I would say the, how you prioritize that, it's not always aligned. A company will launch a new service or a new product and like, this is gonna be so cool. And it serves the needs of maybe what the company is trying to get across. 

Keri (00:02:33) - But at the end of the day, like you have to make sure that the customer cares. And so understanding and doing the research and listening, I think was where I always opened doors and got to run corporate travel at Expedia when they launched at GenSea, their corporate travel product. 

Keri (00:02:45) - And then at Zillow was really fortunate to get the call to say, hey, we are really launching big with agents and we're solving for the technology of making sure that consumers can, you know, put a price tag on every house and give consumers power to the people, the information, but can you help us come also make sure that we serve our agents and the people that we need to go to market through. And so really just fortunate that I got to grow my career through some great companies that put customers at the core as a core value as well. 

Adrian (00:03:12) - I love that. And so a couple of things, like you talk about like being at a business like Zillow early on where, everybody knows Zillow now, Kerry, everybody knows Zillow, but like big part of some of the stuff you were doing, number one, getting agents to understand how to leverage the tool. But like, this was like, this is a huge company that everybody now knows of. But like when you started there, it wasn't necessarily the case, right? There's all this work to create attention, awareness, understanding around what it is. 

Adrian (00:03:38) - And I love the comment you just made. You said a lot of people say content is king. I think, and that is so true, but like context is equally important. People need to understand from the content they're seeing and from the messaging and the marketing they're seeing, what's the context? What's the why? Why do I care about this? So I love that you've got to spend all this different time in all these different businesses doing that. Talk to us a little bit about Attentive today. 

Adrian (00:04:00) - I'm super pumped about this because I know that you and I had some awesome conversations leading up to today's recording, but this is a cool one. I think our listeners are going to like this too, because I think you're going to give them a bunch of different ideas around, number one, what a business like Attentive does, but to your point, all these different ways that we can communicate with customers, that we can touch customers, that we can keep building relationships or strengthening relationships with customers. Tell us a little bit about Attentive.

Keri (00:04:24) - Yeah. So, Attentive was started around 2016. Our founder, Brian Long, a very well-known innovator and I think he's just, I think he's a problem solver. Problem Hunter is the name of his book. And really thought about how do you give companies other ways to build audience, to grow like your segment of who your audience is and how do you reach that audience in a very custom, tailored way. And around the time where personalization, we've been talking about it for years, right? You've heard, we've heard it for, I don't know, I think 20 years. 

Keri (00:04:52) - People say, we've been talking about personalized experiences for a really long time, but they're incredibly hard to scale because they're very human led and they take a ton of time. And so, Attentive was really started around how do you actually automate that one-to-one message? How do you go out to a customer, reach them where they are? And was the first real SMS platform, as far as leveraging SMS to reach customers at scale for big enterprise brands. 

Keri (00:05:17) - When you think about Crate and Barrel or Ugg, or like these really big enterprise customer retail brands, like we were one of the first to actually deliver at scale versus serving like really smaller, small D2C startup type companies. 

Keri (00:05:30) - So that was kind of how it started, was how do you create these very custom journeys that can serve up to you, the customer, the product that you're most interested in, maybe at the time that you're most interested in buying it, but it's still required at that time, really manual work by a lot of teams, by the marketer, right? You have your data in check. The data doesn't work unless it is accurate, right? Like what's their phone number. And so with SMS, you're able to do this really personalized phone number. People change and add emails. 

Keri (00:05:59) - I don't know. I have like six or seven emails that I use for different things in my life, right? But I don't have seven phone numbers. I really have one distinct phone number. And so being able to like know that customer and help our customers, our brands reach them through these very specific identity-based solutions like SMS was a game changer for like advertising at large. 

Speaker 3 (00:06:20) - Yep. 

Adrian (00:06:20) - You know, Carrie, when you say it like that, you're spot on. I'm saying both. It almost becomes difficult to manage, but like I think it might be almost a double-digit email addresses, but you're right. I got this one phone. I got this one phone. I got one phone number. I've had the same phone number now for so long that like anybody tries to message me on my emails, number one, good luck because which one are you actually emailing me at? 

Adrian (00:06:41) - I have the one primary email address that I use the most or that I pay the most attention to or that I'm the most responsive to. Then like to your comment, I have all these other email addresses that I set up strategically for different things, whether it was different businesses that I set up or just like personal versus business versus team. But with the phone, and I don't know about you, but I still get caught with this. I see somebody ring through or I see somebody text through to my phone. They got my attention for that second. 

Adrian (00:07:06) - Until I know who it is or what it's about, but there's that second when you're looking to see who's this. You do the, even whether you're on a call or you're on a meeting or you're literally just sitting there doing work. That's interesting. I think marketers have clearly, number one, they've grown to know that. They've absolutely grown to lever that because there's a minute where you actually have a potential customer or a lead's attention. 

Adrian (00:07:27) - I think it's one of the cool things that attentive and your team is really kind of building there is, and then to your point, you just mentioned there's all this competition in the space right now. You guys are killing it because your team has grown exponentially. 

Adrian (00:07:38) - We're going to get into that in a second, but this is an interesting thing for our listeners to think about is like, we talk about it in this pod all the time, but like knowing your customer mediums, knowing your lead or your opportunity mediums, knowing all the different, I always call it shots of an arrow carry, like different ways that you could shoot an arrow, whether it's email, phone, personal touch where some people are still doing like mallets or some of the traditional type of marketing medium uses, but this is huge. 

Adrian (00:08:01) - This is part of understanding your customer intimately. It's part of understanding all the different ways that you could start a potential customer journey. I just find that fascinating. I think that a lot of people don't stop to kind of think about that. You probably do because you're thinking about marketing every damn day, but for our listeners, I think it's another thing that they can think about. It's not just for the beginning of the journey and just for getting somebody at the top of a funnel. 

Adrian (00:08:22) - This is a thought that you need to be thinking about through the entire customer user journey, regardless of what your willy or your where is, or regardless of what your business is selling. 

Speaker 3 (00:08:30) - Yeah. 

Keri (00:08:30) - I mean, I think you have to think about it as the whole life cycle of the customer, right? And as marketers, we have to manage through all of that through bringing them in and how do we acquire them and how do we get them to say yes, right? Because in SMS, it's an update. You've got to say yes. And while we also have email, which is a huge growing part of our multi-product strategy and definitely serving up this very custom data platform, AI-driven platform that serves email and SMS and bringing that experience together is really important. 

Keri (00:08:58) - Because like you said, you and I might, I have just an email that I use just for shopping, but being able, and then there's still a demographic that only shops, uses email to actually find new products and to get promotions and to figure out where they're going to buy. But a lot of people use both. And so figuring out how do you tie that together to where you serve up an email to someone at a time where maybe they're on email and then you follow up with that text message that says, Hey, we've got those green pants in stock in your size. 

Keri (00:09:25) - And we'll give you a 20% off coupon right now to say, to click yes. There's all of this innovation by scaling that data, like truly give this very personalized experience that I think we've been talking about for a long time. But people have thought it was really impossible to do, or you needed huge teams to like build up your data segment and to manage your data and manually build all these like journeys. And then how do you get people to repeat purchase? Like that is such a big part as well as these brands are so much competition. 

Keri (00:09:51) - If people have a bad experience with a brand, like 70, 76% of consumers, I think was the last report that said I would happily jump to another brand as long as the customer experience was better than the one I was loyal to.

Keri (00:10:02) - And so, if they know me better, even though I'm loyal to that brand, I'm willing to jump to another brand if the product is like in similar quality for a similar price, I won't stay brand loyal anymore like people used to. They want their experience. 

Adrian (00:10:16) - So- That's crazy. And then I hope everybody's listening to that because that just reminds you how this is like a daily battle that all of us are helping them with. You miss one time, and that customer that has an extremely high LTV or an extremely high return rate can be gone like that. We live in a super interesting time and place in the world where it's like consumers know that they have a ton of options. They know that there's going to be another business in line that is willing to create some incentive to get you to jump and to come over. 

Adrian (00:10:40) - So like, it's why we all got to be on our game on a regular basis, Keri. Keri, I'd love to jump into the first pillar team. Tell us about the team at Attentive. 

Adrian (00:10:48) - Even if it's a high level, I'd love, I want to hear about your team and I'd love to hear about some of the things that you're doing with your marketing team, but give us the high level for our listeners that are familiar with Attentive around sort of how the team is built out today or some of the different roles or some of the different departments that are helping to build the Attentive model every single solitary day. 

Keri (00:11:04) - Yeah, I mean, Attentive's about a thousand plus people all in for our engineering, our product, our sales, our CS teams, our marketing teams, our cross-functional teams. So growing, like we've definitely been growing year over year. My marketing team's about 60 people. My marketing team consists of everything from product marketing, which we really invest in because we're a tech multi-platform company. And then we have a decent sized content team. 

Keri (00:11:31) - We have a growth team and growth really is taking care of everything for us as far as like lead acquisition, bringing them down through and converting down to a paid customer. We also have customer marketing, which we just really launched and relaunched this year. I've really focused on just like in the consumer D2C space and retail space in B2B, it is the same competition, right? 

Keri (00:11:52) - Like we have to make sure that we're providing the best customer experience to our customers, the most value, making sure they trust us, making sure they understand like all of our new products and how to think about them and how can they like leverage them and make the most revenue off of our products. So we have a customer marketing team that really focuses on building that kind of voice to the customer lens, fostering the community. 

Keri (00:12:12) - That's the other thing we've really invested in this year that's new for us is like a customer based, we have customer advisory boards and then we do this event every year, which is like the top 50 C levels of our top customers where we invite them in for a couple of days and do a lot of like listening and pitching new products and getting early insight into like what our roadmap should be and then figuring out how do we help them. So customer boards, voice of the customer and then just making sure our customer journey is like rock solid. 

Keri (00:12:38) - And that takes the content team, it takes the growth team, it takes event and experiences. We have a really big event team. We do over 150 third-party events a year in about 50. 

Adrian (00:12:47) - That's awesome. 

Keri (00:12:48) - So we are talking to our customers and our prospects constantly in person and then our CS team is over 300 people. So that's a huge portion of our team and it's a very trusted advisor investment that we've made. And we just finished interviewing and doing some qualitative and quant survey with about 200 of our customers. And one of the number one things, the number one thing that came back was trust. Like we trust attentive and that doesn't just get you the, you're in it every day. 

Keri (00:13:16) - Like the platform's reliable and dependability as far as our deliverability, all of those things matter from the tech side. And one of the things that we said over and over again was we trust you. We trust that you're in it with us. And that means we trust you when you wanna bring new products to market or when you wanna push the boundaries with us, we're a lot more willing to say yes because we actually trust you and that you care about our success. And so that is something we've really leaned into from the marketing side. 

Adrian (00:13:43) - First of all, that's awesome because if you think about it anywhere in life, anywhere in life, not outside of business guys, but like trust is like, number one, it's super powerful word, right? You trust somebody. There's a bunch of things typically that have had to happen before that for that trust to be built. Trust is built, trust is earned, trust is gained, trust is won. So like, number one, it just proves that you got a bunch of your customers and some of your primary users out there that trust attentive like that. 

Adrian (00:14:13) - That means a bunch of really positive things happen to get to that point. That's number one. Number two, this is.

Adrian (00:14:21) - You guys are in a competitive space, right, you guys are building an AI-powered SMS and email marketing platform that can do so many things, but guess what? Many other technology and software companies are claiming to do the same damn thing, right? So, like- and Nini were joking about it the other day- but, like, we're in this space right now, this space and time and place in the world where, like, trust is fricking hard to gain trust is like it's not easy. It's like that's like a huge, that's almost like a metric or a win that many can't even achieve. 

Adrian (00:14:51) - So, like the fact that you already have all these people that feel that way about the business, feel that way about the platform, they clearly are seeing the results or they've seen the wins, or they've seen all the benefits to the business that they're using, that's huge, dude. That's something that you guys should be really, really proud of. 

Keri (00:15:06) - Yeah, it is. It's something that we like from a marketing like it is the sea of same. Everybody sounds the same. 

Keri (00:15:12) - When I look at our like top five competitor websites right now, or their positioning or their marketing, we are all these multi-channel AI-driven marketing platforms, right, like, we're all kind of saying the same things, and so it's like trust is one that we really look at as a differentiator, because it does take time and it takes delivering consistency and like putting the customer first and helping them grow their revenue and growing their opportunity- like that is where we are really leaning in for marketing as a differentiator as well. 

Speaker 3 (00:15:39) - I love it. 

Adrian (00:15:39) - Before we jump from team carrie, I want to ask you: so you alone have 60 people on your team. You mentioned a huge CS team too, by the way. That's awesome. That might be one of the bigger CS teams that we've had one of our guests share on the CXCP. But let's go to your team first. How, in your early days at Attentive, how did you kind of think about which of those different focus areas you sort of needed first? 

Adrian (00:16:02) - Or how did you already kind of know- and maybe it was part of your playbook, right, because you came from all these other big companies- you'd already run all these big marketing teams? How did you kind of think about what you were going to build first? Or how did you prioritize some of the like? What building blocks did you almost know you needed to kind of build the foundation of the marketing team that you're now leading? 

Adrian (00:16:20) - Was there either a few key roles or a few key people or a few key areas that you know you needed to start with before you started to build on top of that. Like I'd just kind of love to understand how you started to kind of think about some of the early fixtures that you knew you needed to build a foundation on your team upon. 

Keri (00:16:36) - Yeah, I think I'll speak to you from when I took over leading the entire team. I've been here for two and a half years and so I came in as a partner, marketer and experiences and events lead and so that team. I definitely did a lot of work when I got here and worked across the leadership team at the time when I came in to make sure we had the right roles and we were advocating for the right roles. And I think, as I think about marketing and like where you start to build the team, product marketing is really essential. 

Keri (00:17:02) - Like you have to make sure you have the right fit from a product marketing leader in the team that you build to where your product is from a maturity level right, you can't always bring in, like the best product marketer at Google or a Salesforce might not be the best product marketer at an attentive which operates very much like a very fast moving entrepreneurial startup type company where you don't have huge bunches of people to do work. 

Keri (00:17:24) - So I think product marketing is one that I focused on: hiring the right leadership and making sure the team is organized in the way to best support how fast our business is moving right now. That's a key one for me. And then I think the like just the growth and the customer marketing team. As far as whatever you call it- they're called retention teams, they're called growth teams, they're called performance teams. There's definitely different models of it. 

Keri (00:17:44) - But making sure, when you think about driving pipeline, which is really important, even in, like early days or even in later stage, where you have this a massive customers and you need to now like keep and expand and grow those customers, you still have to as you go into new verticals or you launch new products, you've got to be really, really good at figuring out how to build your pipeline and keep that pipeline really healthy and serve up the highest quality for sales. No matter how you measure MQLs or demos, whatever you measure, it doesn't matter. 

Keri (00:18:11) - So those, I think, are like the essentials, because you can outsource, like agency, and that creative and content work. I love that we have a big part of that in-house with a great brand and content team, but there's definitely different parts that I think are essential, which to me it's like that growth and performance and customer marketing team and the product marketing team and then that event experience team. 

Keri (00:18:31) - They are out hustling and they are part of our go-to-market motion, like whenever they're on site and they're thinking about it, they have as strong of relationships with our customers from all of those face-to-face interactions as many of our sales and account management and CST members do. So all of them are really, I think, foundational and you just have to figure out like where's the biggest gap? And so much of it, Adrian, really depends on how the rest of your go-to-market team is set up. 

Keri (00:18:54) - So if you have like really strong voice- the customer and account directors and CS enablement leaders that create a lot of education and content on the go-to-market side, depending on how marketing fits into, that really depends on like where's the gap. And so I've just kind of come in and tried to figure out like where do we have the biggest gaps? And for me this last year, customer marketing was like one of our biggest investments. 

Adrian (00:19:16) - I love it and you know, Karen, when you say it like that and for our listeners like 

Speaker 3 (00:19:20) - Okay. 

Adrian (00:19:20) - So many of our listeners to our are building tomorrow's emerging companies right there they're- these incredible guys and gals that are founders and executives of other startup companies and SMBs are trying to figure out how to find their product market fit in a certain space and in place in the world. 

Adrian (00:19:34) - But for our listeners, you know, quick pause and go back to what and rewind and listen to what Carrie just said, because if you're not thinking about sort of how you build almost like a customized plan for building your own product market fit in your business, in your own space, in the area that you're trying to dominate or take control of, there's a lot that goes into this. Right like it's. 

Adrian (00:19:53) - It's not just understanding product research, it's not just understanding how to build and tell a story exceptionally well about why a customer should even think about using or looking at you as a potential option. Then you mentioned content. Carrie's talked, Carrie's mentioned content and she's mentioned her content team multiple times already. 

Adrian (00:20:09) - Guys, this is some of the, the tangible stuff that gets people to even think about clicking on yes or or saying yes to an event where they're gonna go meet with one of your- your event specialists that are gonna teach them more about it. But the last piece, too, is just the community engagement, and this is funny because you've literally mentioned your events, part of your team, multiple times. I'm thinking about that trust comment you made a little bit earlier: carry. You don't get trust from like sales and marketing assets. 

Adrian (00:20:34) - You don't get trust from like landing pages. You don't get trust from like I know that that builds, I get I like I know that those are some of the built like once you start to like actually meet with people in flesh and like you, you understand or feel or sense their passion or their feelings, or even just the education you know. 

Adrian (00:20:49) - For me, so much of like the events, it's education and and like learning about, not just there, why attentive could be the best, but learning about attentives, entire landscape understanding or learning about their competitors, understanding about some of the other. That's the stuff that ends up making you kind of decide which direction you sort of want to go in, and those are definitely some of the building blocks of trust right there. So I I love that. Um, okay, I'd love to jump into the second pillar of tools. 

Adrian (00:21:14) - Can you spend a couple minutes kind of talking about number one? I let's. Let's make sure that our listeners understand exactly what tools attentive has. 

Adrian (00:21:21) - Because, let's me, that's a big part of why I was so pumped to get you on the show today- is, I think a lot of our listeners are people that are gonna be prime future users of attentive, right, they're people that need to get better at communicating with their customers or, as they scale it, as they grow, they gotta have, they've got to have a better, a better toolkit for all the different ways that they're gonna communicate with their customers. 

Adrian (00:21:39) - Spend a couple minutes, um, oh, and then, lastly- sorry I don't know what you're if you're able to share like some of the tools or some of the tech stack that attentive had to invest in and had to build as you guys have scaled and as you've grown the business. But a few minutes, kind of talking about tools, yeah, so I'll talk about. 

Keri (00:21:55) - When I talk about tools, I'll start with like our platform and what attentive, how we serve our customers right and how we innovate and what we build and kind of what we optimize for, like our, our mission- and we say it time and time again- but it is to like really build those bespoke one-to-one customers all right, one to one, to one. Let's say this again: it's to build like one-to-one, bespoke experiences with customers and the brands they love. So that's kind of like how do we connect the two? How do we sit between the brand and the consumer? 

Keri (00:22:22) - How do we make it as easy as possible for the brand to be able to have the best personalized, most interactive one-to-one messages, engagements, shopping experiences, whatever it might be, with that customer? Because there's lots of variables as the platform and the space continues to evolve. So when I think about our platform, we definitely have a really solid like. 

Keri (00:22:41) - One of the things we hear from our customers also is the usability of our platform is really easy once you get into attentive and how you manage your journeys and how you upload your data and how you customize the content. We have been almost two years into the generative AI motion of having copy assistant and image assistant, like things that were really easy and early in the in the AI journey of like making sure that customers could do more with less. 

Keri (00:23:04) - Like how does a small marketing team do a lot of customization with the data that they have and the product catalog they have? And in the last year, like where we've really started to innovate is where we're now deep with email. As far as how many customers we have with email, it's I I need to get you the number of age let me think about. That is I don't know if I can say it publicly, let's let's just say we have hundreds, we have, we now have. 

Speaker 3 (00:23:29) - So let me go back. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:31) - So on the platform level, we also now have hundreds of customers on email and SMS. And where we've really been able to like lean in lately is now with the ability to power all of that with AI. And I think what you and I know, and what we've talked about in our conversations, is like AI is only as good as our data. Like it doesn't, AI works off of signal, it works off of how does the data work together, where does it live? 

Speaker 2 (00:23:56) - And in the world of like how consumers are now shopping everywhere, they might go from their mobile phone to their PC, back to their phone, to their iPad, and might access stuff through a brand's app, or they might access it through the site, or they might access it through some type of marketing channel, SMS or email. And so the signal that our customers have gets lost, right? They can't track all of that across all those. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:18) - So what's really, really important about our platform is we really track a lot of the browser data, and we have a lot of the consumer data across many platforms, and we're able to help the brand actually use all of that data. And through AI, we can do things like we can serve up a message to a person based on the time they want to receive it, very, very hyper-personalized to their shopping experience on the type of product, so the right product at the right time with the right message. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:42) - And even now, like you can serve it up in a really, really brand-specific message. So people get it in the tone and the voice they're used to receiving from that brand. It doesn't feel like AI anymore. Like a couple years ago, AI chatbots didn't feel like humans. It's a very elegant, graceful experience where it really feels like you're having a custom human interaction. And all of our AI products, our AI Pro product, which many of our customers are on today, has been a game-changer as far as scale and performance. 

Speaker 2 (00:25:10) - So definitely lean into AI and our identity products, because without that, the AI doesn't work. So that's really where our platform is focused. 

Adrian (00:25:18) - I love that. It carries the same thing on the CS and the support side. More often than not, a layman customer doesn't even realize that they're not talking to a person. It's a bot. But in all fairness, I think the thing I'm going to say right after that, though, however, it's a bot that was designed by people knowing all the things that you're getting at right now that they already knew about their customers, or they knew about their customer base, or the information that they have, or the good data in, right? 

Adrian (00:25:43) - Good data in allows for good performance out. Shit data in is usually going to give you shit performance out. That's the thing that our listeners got to remember, right? That's to Kerry's point about making sure the stuff that you're putting into this logic has got to be good, guys, or else whatever is going to come off the back end of it, it's going to feel that way. But we're in this interesting time and place where a lot of people still don't realize that. And by the way, that's some smart people, too. 

Adrian (00:26:04) - There's still smart people that are working in our space and working in technology that are still trying to wrap their heads around it. I'm not proclaiming to be an AI expert either. 

Adrian (00:26:12) - But guys, this is something that if you haven't done it already, you really need to take some time to understand at a high level how you're at least going to be a part of building the logic, building the prompt base, thinking about what responses, thinking about some of the stuff that Kerry talked about, how you're going to continue to create a personalized, branded feel off the back end of some of the technology that you're going to lever to be able to aid scale and to be able to help your business with managing its responses. So I love that. 

Adrian (00:26:41) - Kerry, you've worked at all these different businesses and you've built all these different marketing teams. Has there been a handful of go-to, OG, ride-or-die type of pieces of marketing technology that you know you need inside of your marketing tech stack? Or has every business and every team and every industry, as you've gone throughout your career, kind of required different things? 

Adrian (00:27:02) - Is there almost like a short list of non-negotiable market tech tools that you need, or have you kind of had to take it business by business, industry by industry, customer base by customer base? 

Speaker 2 (00:27:13) - You know, I think so much of that depends on the product, especially in tech, the product that your company has built. Because in some companies, so much like your reporting, your access to customer data, how well-integrated your lifecycle tools and market tech stack are integrated really depends on the product. So at Zillow, our product team actually owned a lot of our lifecycle marketing because it was so deeply built into the product itself and the interface that consumers had with our site. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:37) - So it's very different than here on very much more of the B2B space. Like my tech stack originates out of marketing and sales and RevOps, right? So we integrate really closely with our Salesforce instance and leverage HighSpot as a way that we enable our frontlines and our teams and create like agency credentialing platforms that we have to use, like different LMS systems to make sure that the people serving our customers through that B2B extension can be up to speed on like what their requirements are and what the tools do and the education piece. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:06) - So it's just and we use lots of different tools as far as on the customer side, reaching our customers through, you know, we definitely use our own platform, SMS, as well as like email is a huge channel for us still on the B2B space and using things added on like Sixth Sense for like the ABM management. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:22) - We use lots of different like site pop-ups and we try and test different things that actually help us figure out like how do you customize the content even on the B2B side, whether it's on-site pop-ups that are specific to a customer that's at a certain set of sign-in or is going through the UX portion and how do you use like Pendo to do custom like product adoption elements to make sure people are aware email alone isn't enough, SMS alone isn't enough, we're doing like in-product awareness as well. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:51) - So we're looking at lots of different parts of the tech stack and now for me, I really believe in all of the groups I'm on, on the CMO side as well as CX, like we have to as leaders like really prioritize not just.

Speaker 2 (00:29:05) - investing in the products that we're selling to our customers, but how do we leverage those same? So in AI is one, like how do I put a certain percentage of my budget and time to technology that scales my team, whether that's on the content creation side or some of the AI generation stuff. It just like, how do I leverage the right tools to help scale my team, as well as looking at stuff on our CS and our customer service side, our onsite chatbot, quote unquote, experiences that are very custom and tailored. 

Speaker 2 (00:29:36) - Like we really have to spend more time, I think as leaders, like investing it internally as well. So that's where I'm spending a lot of time right now. 

Adrian (00:29:44) - I love it. And I love the fact that you just said something that I'm not gonna lie to you, we don't hear every guest say, which is using your own damn tool, right? Like literally walking the walk and not just talking the talk, where like you can literally show either future potential users or your current customers, your current clients, here's another way that we did it with our tool. Here's another way that you could potentially do it. Here's what we learned from these 100 or 200 or 500 customers around how they leverage it. 

Adrian (00:30:08) - Like that stuff is gold, man. That is like, you can't, there's not a better way to show a potential, a new potential customer, why this might be a thing that could literally be a game changer for your business. I love it. And I get it, it's hard, right? And early on, early days of building a company, building a business, it's tough. 

Adrian (00:30:26) - Like you only have so many customers, so it's hard to show some of those use cases and some of those wins, but like the minute you start getting an achieving scale, you can literally show all of these different, like potential use cases and wins for how others have used it. That is like literally showing how you're, it almost changes the game for marketing. 

Adrian (00:30:45) - It almost changes the way that you can get somebody else interested in jumping into the pipe and being a potential future user around just seeing all the other ways that companies like you have been able to use it. I love that. I think that's a game changer. Kerry, I'd love to jump into the third pillar of process. 

Adrian (00:31:00) - And this one, this is interesting because I'm interested from like a CMO perspective, sort of what this looks like, but you know how I always ask this question, but like in your background and in your journey, your customer-focused business leader journey, as you've gotten deeper and deeper and deeper into your career, how have you sort of thought about number one, just kind of wrangling knowledge or wrangling process, or especially as you've gotten to bigger and bigger companies where you've got, let's call it what it is, things get more complex, things get more sophisticated. 

Adrian (00:31:27) - You've got a bunch of different executive playbooks coming together, both all that stuff together. But like, how have you sort of thought about like managing playbooks or managing process or even just managing knowledge in general on the marketing front as you've gotten deeper in your career? 

Speaker 2 (00:31:43) - Yeah, I mean, you would think with more tools, it gets easier, but it doesn't, it never gets easier. No, it doesn't. 

Adrian (00:31:50) - It never gets easier, it only gets harder. 

Speaker 2 (00:31:52) - Yeah, I think it's also a big part of process for me is just like setting the right expectations and creating the accountability, right? You've got to have true decision maker responsibility. You've got to have accountability on who owns what pieces. For my direct reports and my leadership team, I'm a big proponent of you've got to, although it's nice for everybody being included, somebody has to be responsible for pushing information down and out with a process, with a strategy shift, whatever the narrative might be. 

Speaker 2 (00:32:21) - It's really important that people own it. So that to me has been a part of the process that I've kind of always come in and implemented on who owns what piece of kind of what information is it? Who owns the strategy? Who owns our metrics and KPIs? Does everybody understand the work that they're doing and how they relate? And then just really being able to communicate, like I'm a big, big believer in you have to have, a lot of companies are like, okay, ours are too much. And you've got to just have like key KPIs. 

Speaker 2 (00:32:50) - And for me, it's like, you've got to have goals for the company, and then you have to distill those down to what they mean for your team and make sure people are focused on the right things. Cause it's really easy to get distracted on the, I call it like keeping the lights on rhythm of the business where your sales member, your sales stakeholders and your sales stakeholders will always need a million things. But at some point you don't need 200 more case studies. You need like five of the right case studies. 

Speaker 2 (00:33:14) - Those case studies have to be communicated out in the way that the customer receives it, the front lines have it. And so like you're focused on doing the right work. So the processes that you put in place for that, I think is like accountability, really clear accountability, really clear outcomes. 

Speaker 2 (00:33:27) - And then like the documentation piece, if you don't have a source of truth for your team, I don't care what team you are, if you don't have a roadmap for your team on how you're going to prioritize every quarter, like what's above and below the cut line, which is really hard when your team is very much a yes to everything team and in service to a lot of teams. But if you don't have that, then you can't actually have the conversation about what you can't or can support. 

Speaker 2 (00:33:50) - If a new initiative comes out, if we're going to go to market with a product much faster than we thought, you don't know your trade-offs. And so you've got to be able to really have a clear roadmap with ownership, I think in order to help your team focus on the right things and make the right decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:34:02) - those trade-offs. So I don't over-process or over-engineer, but that source of truth for me is how we drive the business. 

Adrian (00:34:09) - I love that. So a couple of things that immediately makes me think of is, number one, creating clear areas of accountability, responsibility, authority across your team. So whether it's across your team, whether it's across the whole organization, because those three things right there, Carrie, to your point, now everybody understands sort of the marching orders around who the hell is going to be doing what. 

Adrian (00:34:28) - Number two, a big thing that I just heard you say that I freaking love and I promise I'm talking about it all the time, not only in the show, but with our clients at CXC, is this notion of controlling and monitoring. Look, you're crazy, guys. If something... First of all, you're lying to yourselves, guys, if you don't think something is changing every damn day or every single week in your business. 

Adrian (00:34:46) - That's the beauty of today's world, is like every week you show up, there's new learnings, there's new findings, there's different ebbs and flows, there's different pivots and changes. That's part of the beauty of being in business in today's world, is like we've got this ability to sort of be flexible and you're always learning and you're always kind of moving around. Then the third and last thing is what you just said, documentation. 

Adrian (00:35:05) - I'm telling you the reason why I... Part of why I started the show, Carrie, is like trying to give other business leaders the idea or trying to remind them on a constant basis. If you are not chronically in things, if your business, especially as the business and the team grows, if you're not documenting and chronically and capturing the now, it's really difficult for a bigger, broader team in the future to sort of understand where you've been, to understand how the hell you've got to get to where you've got to go. 

Adrian (00:35:33) - I think that people forget that sometimes. I get it. For some of our listeners that are still in the scrappy building mode and they're getting their startup up and running, they're getting their customer portfolio going, they're just learning how to fill a pipeline, I get it. It might feel like it's the least important thing at that stage of a company's journey, but it's not. It's going to help you understand things that you can do later or it's going to understand to you which key areas you can double down on later to really make a big impact. 

Adrian (00:35:58) - So I love some of those ideas that you laid out. Here, I'd love to jump into the fourth and final pillar of feedback. You know that this is my favorite one. I always say it every time, but I love listening and hearing how all of our guests think about this. I'm going to split it into two for you. You're a CMO of an incredible company that is working with all these awesome businesses across the earth. 

Adrian (00:36:18) - Can you maybe spend a few minutes talking about how you think about as you've gotten deeper into your career, ways that you've really started to understand or things that you've kind of found are almost like the most important pieces of leveraging customer feedback? And then I want you to spend a couple minutes also talking about what are some of the ways you've gotten really good as you've gotten deeper into your career and as you've ran more and more teams and grown more of these teams, how you sort of manage or how you leverage employee feedback? 

Adrian (00:36:44) - I'd love to kind of just hear you talk about those two different feedback sets for a bit. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:49) - Yeah, I think, you know, customer feedback, whether you're in a consumer-based D2C business or you're in B2B, it doesn't matter, right? You need to figure out how to get the insights, how to do the research, and how do you like understand and know your customer in a way that you can educate others? And I think that that has been something over my career. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:08) - I've always assumed that people had the same curiosity about the customer problem and did not do probably as great of a job as being proactive and helping educate people with maybe what I know or what I learned or what my team has learned. And so now I'm really proactive in it. Like I said, we just completed the 200 customer survey on feedback, and it was really easy to focus on how do I get in the hands of my team to activate and to go and execute against what we've learned. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:38) - But what was really important was that I took the time to educate all of my senior leaders, like the rest of my C-suite team and the leaders of major teams that we all work with and making sure that that process was as important as getting my team to activate. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:50) - So I think just remembering to use the information you have and educate people with the kind of the research or the inputs that you have, because different types of people, like the product team needs a different lens on that research than like the marketing team might be more up as far as like earlier in the discovery of new products, what we're building, but they also need to know like what people even believe true about current products, right? So you have to educate them on that. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:20) - But that was one thing is just like assuming that everybody has the same level of curiosity and then not actually prioritizing the education of like what you learn and what you know. I think that's a really, really important part of that consumer and customer insights piece.

Adrian (00:38:35) - Yeah, I completely agree. I promise you, as a CX- or I would argue, as I've gotten deeper into my my career and as we've worked with more and more and more businesses- it's almost like the, the translation or the normalization or the storytelling inside internally. That's like the biggest gain. It's getting the product people to understand whoa, whoa, whoa. They never said that they wanted that type of additional feature. 

Adrian (00:38:59) - They actually said that the most important thing that they need is this and that can create a whole internal debate and that can create a whole bunch of fiery conversations downstream or south side, on the south side. It's, it's. It's almost like normalizing across whoa, we sold this but remember the customer expectation thought that they were gonna gain this type of thing off of the, off the back end, but not that and it's. 

Adrian (00:39:22) - It's having some of those conversations internally and really kind of course correcting or just generally coming to a new place of agreement internally around what is really gonna create the biggest benefits for your customer and your user. That's one of the biggest wins. It really is. 

Adrian (00:39:35) - And storytelling, lastly, storytelling: the better any business can get at storytelling internally, the easier it's gonna be to get a bunch of people excited about number one wanting to learn about your product or your service, and then it's certainly gonna get a hell of a lot easier to get people to understand why they got to keep using it or why they got to keep listening to maybe the new feature sets or the new offerings or the new service sets that you've got downstream as you hold them as customers longer and longer and longer. 

Speaker 2 (00:39:58) - Yeah, I think that's it. It's a really important the storytelling piece. I- I just like hired a person with that in their title and I've received a lot of feedback. 

Speaker 2 (00:40:07) - That's not, you know, you can't like quantify someone's output as a storyteller, but I just believe it's worth it because you, you know, we tell we have all these great instances of customer evidence where we lean into like all of these performance numbers and, like you know, vitamin shop got 43% overall, higher engagement or higher revenue, and like what people really want to know is: why did vitamin shop decide to? What was the lever for one that hey, we're ready to test AI, like what was the thing that pushed them to it? 

Speaker 2 (00:40:36) - Why did they trust us to do it? What was the problem we were solving? And it's not just the results they got, but it's like, did it allow them to not hire a third person because they didn't need somebody to do the customization. They could do it at scale, like what is the story decided and using them as an example. But like that's the storytelling piece of it could be about the person, it could be about the marketer and like their aha moments as much as the data and performance. 

Speaker 2 (00:40:58) - And internally, for the storytelling of like segmentation- I think that's another one we keep running into- is you can't sell everybody in the space the same things because they don't. They don't have the same resources, right. So how do you make sure that your, your SMB or your mid-market sales team has a very specific remit and goal when they have conversations with prospective customers? It's very different than your enterprise and strat teams. 

Speaker 2 (00:41:19) - The sales cycles are different, what you arm them with and a lot of times at a startup, you you start with like one thing: it's one size fits all and you have the same pitch for everyone. As you get bigger and you grow into new verticals and totally and the customers and geos- like you've is a marketing team especially- you have to like know those customers specifically, what they care about, and then make sure that you're working to get your story right across the company to solve their unique problems. 

Adrian (00:41:42) - 100%. Could not agree more, carry. This has been absolutely fantastic. Number one: I'm so pumped that you- you were able to come on the CH chemicals podcast and share your story. Number two: I guys, carry, carry kept saving before she's engaged. Are you sure this is gonna be good? I'm the same like carry. 

Adrian (00:41:56) - I need more CMOs like you coming on the, coming on the show and sharing how all these different ways of thinking about how different customer focus business leaders are attacking their business problems, thinking about how they can grow, thinking about how they can build their teams. This was, this was awesome, and you gave so many incredible golden nuggets and CTAs for our listeners today. But before I let you go, carry, where can people? 

Adrian (00:42:16) - Number one: where can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about Kerry McGee and if they want to learn more about attentive? Where can they get in touch with you and where can they learn more about attentive? 

Speaker 2 (00:42:23) - Yeah, they can certainly find me on LinkedIn, Kerry McGee. 

Speaker 3 (00:42:27) - Inside, it's easy to find me. 

Speaker 2 (00:42:28) - And then the other place for attentive is our websites. A great place to start. We have a. We have one of the most robust, interesting case study searches I think is out there. 

Speaker 2 (00:42:36) - So if you're in a really small D to C for beauty or you're in a large vitamin company or you're a sports team that's trying to figure out how to do really cool interactive engagements with your fan base- like there are a lot of great case studies on attentive comm and you can go to attentive comm under case studies and resources and find pretty much any possible relevant experience or learn about the people that we work really closely with. So super easy to find us. 

Adrian (00:42:59) - I love it. Kerry McGee, thank you so much for joining the CH chronicles podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on. 

Speaker 2 (00:43:04) - Thanks, Adrian.