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Future-proofing the humans behind the tech. Follow Jon and Phil on their mission to help marketers level up and have successful careers in the constantly evolving world of martech.
Philippe Gamache 0:00
What's up guys, welcome to the humans of martech podcast. His name is John Taylor. My name is Phil Gamache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing What's up everyone today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Anthony Lamott CEO and co founder at Deselect. Anthony started his career as a CRM consultant at Deloitte, Belgium where he got his first taste of salesforce.com. He moved over to wig as a business and tech consultant where he continued advising companies on CRM, but also started expanding into martec. He later joined for C as a lead consultant for marketing automation. And he also took a turn in house on a one year contract as a marketing automation lead at Toyota Europe, where he rolled out Salesforce marketing cloud. During his consulting years, Anthony teamed up with his friend Jonathan where they met at Deloitte and they each started three startups from scratch, of which the first one was together. And in 2019, they joined forces again, Anthony is co founder went all in on their fourth startup Deselect. Today, over 1000 organizations use the marketing optimization platform, including companies like T Mobile, Volvo, Cornell University, and many many more. Anthony, thank you so much for your time today. I'm really pumped to chat.
Anthony Lamot 1:29
It's really awesome being here. I'm a huge fan of the show. So I feel I'm meeting my super Rockstar heroes. So
Philippe Gamache 1:37
appreciate that. We've definitely checked out your your podcast, too. You're, you're doing some green stuff. as well. We'll link out to your show as well. I'm sure some folks are fans of the platform that you built on and will be able to cross some some listeners there. This episode is brought to you by our friends at knack. launching an email or landing page and your marketing automation platform shouldn't feel like assembling an airplane mid flight with no instructions. But too often, that's exactly how it feels. NAC is like an instruction set for campaign creation for establishing brand guardrails and streamlining your approval process to knacks no code, drag and drop editor to help you build emails and landing pages. No more having to stop midway through your campaign to fix something simple Knack lets you work with your entire team in real time and stops you having to fix things midflight check them out@naqt.com That's kn a K and tell them we sent you. This episode was brought to you by our friends at customer IO oversold the note legacy marketing automation platform that is still struggling to update its user interface. I've done a tour of duty with all the major marketing automation platforms and many are definitely similar customer I O is the most intuitive and beautiful platform. I'm talking about the industry's top visual workflow builder to design and implement your unique messaging strategy. Powerful A B testing features inside your workflows not just on subject line sense, hold out testing functionality to see the incremental impact to your messages, queue draft mode. So you can QA messages and conditions in production with real users before anything is sent. Copy workflow items, so you don't have to repeat the building process again and monitor campaigns, tests and keyless membership growth from your personalized dashboard. The icing on the cake marketers using customer EO have seen a 20% increase in conversion rates from strategic messaging. So stop using clunky old tools and adopt a multi channel approach that creates joyful interactions with your customers start a free trial without a credit card@customer.ao And tell them we sent you. I've also checked out your newsletter on LinkedIn. Some pretty cool thoughts from a founder for time founder there and one of the things I wanted to ask you right off the top was your advice on for aspiring founders is to just right off the bat quit their job as soon as possible after they've saved up a little bit, maybe a few months of expenses. How do you attain that level of like 100% of confidence in your abilities to take that leap?
Anthony Lamot 4:08
Yeah, this this is a really fun question, actually. And hope maybe it helps you guys. But um, no, the reason why it's so important is because focus is everything in entrepreneurship. And if you still have the cushion and the comfort of some daytime job, you're just not going to be as focused for the history buffs out there. I love the story of during the siege of Troy how the ancient Greek King Agamemnon had the ships burn of the soldier so there was no way back. So they were all in. And that's a little bit how you have to think about it when you start your business. Now to answer your departure question, how you attain 100% confidence if you don't, I think, you know, maybe after a few times, it gets easier but there's always nagging doubts, always reasons not to do it and you kind of just need to get over yourself. And this is where it's almost as if entrepreneurship is is kind Weird going into dissociation disorder or, you know, multiple personality disorder because on the one hand, we all know the data. And we know how few startups are successful, but whatever metric you take, but for me as an entrepreneur, it's binary, we're gonna make it right. And you need to have confidence for yourself. Because it going is gonna get tough. It's not always easy. But you also need to radiate that passion to, I think, attract and inspire great people to work with you. And it's a huge part of the success.
Jon Taylor 5:29
Cool answer? I mean, we're obviously with the podcast and our own stuff, thinking about like, our next steps in our careers. One thing that I liked that you wrote about on LinkedIn was about this idea of selling your idea before you even write a line of code, and how this increases your chances of success. I've read like the lean startup in this methodology, but I think this is like, is a great grounding exercise for folks to be able to like, Hey, does my idea actually pass a sniff test? It's cat sounds cool to me. But you know, beyond you, and your mom is going to have any success. Walk us through the early days of deselect and the network, you had to pitch your ideas against?
Anthony Lamot 6:06
Oh, so by the way, I love how you JT pointed out beyond your mom, because one of the recommendations I would give in reply to this question is read the Mom Test. If you haven't read it. It's a great funny book. But it actually will echo what I'm about to say. So we sell before we built what does that mean? Well, it's opposed to coming up with a great idea. I think there is the myth, and the notion that entrepreneurs come up with a great idea. And then just things fall into place. And it couldn't be farther from from the truth. In fact, I'm, you know, Phil mentioned in the intro, I had a few startups before, and they didn't really go anywhere, to be honest. And that's because probably, to a large extent, because they start with great ideas. And so after those three, like, Okay, well, what's an actual problem laying in front of me. And I remember the moment like, yesterday, I was sitting at one of my consulting clients literally looking around. And like hell, all these marketers are really frustrated with writing sequel to segment, maybe I should do something like that. And guess what, that's the company we're talking about now. Now beyond that. Obviously, when we started, we were able to tap into our networks channels, and I had been embedded in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 10 years, I think, at a time. And so I could just hit my customers, and there was a relation, there was a credibility, but it was still more of a, Hey, what's your challenge, and at the very end, we would show what we had in mind. And that magical moment came when one of my insurance clients at the time asked Oh, so how much does it cost? Could you make us a quote? And what was funny is that we hadn't written a single line of code at the time. And we're like, oh, maybe we should start doing that. Right. But it was such a such a cool moment, because it was really the validation we were looking for. And beyond that, I think for for anyone who's starting a startup, really tapping into the community that is around the challenge you face. For us, that was pretty easy, because the Salesforce ecosystem is pretty strong with user groups and all that we were able to tap into that a lot. Very
Philippe Gamache 8:04
cool. Yeah, I think that's that's great advice. I'm trying to think of like the the earlier conversations that you guys had where you were just pitching this idea, having conversations and like that first client that was like, oh, like, how much would that cause you're like, oh, shit, like now. Now, we found something. I wanted to, I wanted to ask you about like, I guess the the answer to why Mar tech is because obviously, like you started your career in there, and sort of your co founder, you're already embedded in the Salesforce ecosystem, like you said, but you've actually written about, like the pace of change in martec. And how you know, like Scott Brinker is 11k plus tools. We talk a lot on the show about like the future of CDP's and the overlap of data tools, warehouse, native martec, email sender guidelines, Gen AI, like, there's so many things changing in our industry. And I'm curious, your advice for folks that are listening, who maybe already feel overwhelmed with their day to day stuff at their current job, who also have to stay on top of all of these things changing constantly. What advice do you have there? Anthony? Right. Well,
Anthony Lamot 9:14
obviously, they should all listen to humans of martech. And I'm only half joking because I do think there's been very interesting things discussed in this podcast, including the interview with Scott was was fantastic. But you look my answer is not going to be mind blowing or maybe super exciting. It comes down to constant learning and yes, you have to carve out time for that or you know, if you're passionate enough do it in your free time. I obtained many of the certificates that I still hold today in weekends. One thing I would say though, especially when it pertains to mark tech is get your hands dirty. It really hands on with the Tech because in five minutes of messing around with a tool you can learn so much more than whatever white paper because honestly, there's a lot of obfuscation in our industry and it has to do a lot with product Mark. Cutting and how things are presented. And ultimately, you know, a bit of a contrary opinion maybe but analyst relations aren't really working either. It still baffles me how many customers don't actually realize that many of these analyst relations providers are really pay to play, which is a bit of a shocking thing sometimes. But hey, it is what it is. Beyond that, I think, every so beyond your individual learning, I do think from an organizational point of view, Every organization should be spending about 10% of time, resources and money on experimentation, because it's just that the yes, a lot of it's gonna fail, but the few golden nuggets you find are gonna be really tremendous in the long run. And then I will also say, for anyone who is a professional, or even entrepreneur, embed yourself in community, and I've mentioned that before, but go into user groups, maybe dinners, the one or two things you will learn the one or two connections you will make they can really be have a dramatic positive impact on your career and on your learning. So that will be my advice.
Jon Taylor 10:57
I want to loop back to and maybe some of the answers to my next question will be from your previous one. But like, it's almost like hyperbole at this point, or cliche to talk about the pace of change in martec. You know, it's, it's a constant truth, since I think all of us got into martec. Way back when, what do you think are like the constant truths? Like, what hasn't changed? What hasn't changed about being skilled in martec? Like, what do the the top martec the top marketing operations folks, what attributes do they have that are just like future proofed? That aren't going to change?
Anthony Lamot 11:33
That is a great question. I think they understand marketing. And it might sound very obvious, but honestly, I'm gonna admit, like, I came from the CRM side, I came over from the I mean, I studied psychology originally, interestingly enough, but then I went heavily into tech. And so I came from a very consulting CRM heavy side, I honestly only started to learn about marketing after a while, and if you don't really know what marketers are really trying to obtain how, how their workflow looks like, what what a campaign planning is, I mean, very hard to have good technology that supports that. That's one side that's, you know, your business colleague that you need to kind of serve as a market from a marketing operations point of view, or at least need to understand what the objections objectives, excuse me, are maybe objections to sometimes, but um, there was an interesting Freudian slip of the tongue. But the other thing is then, and this is more on the IT side, I think, understanding architecture. One principle that I like to apply to my business, but also in our marketing department is knowing when to decide fast, and when to decide slow, right? And deciding fast, most of the decisions you have to make and date, you can decide very fast, but ever so often, say lead assignment rules, say integrations between systems say data model, these are decisions that you should take very slowly, because you can get it wrong. If you get it wrong, it's very painful to undo. And so you should really take a bit more time for those decisions. But other decisions, you know, stupid example, maybe what was going to be the subject line or the color of the button, those can be taken very fast, because they're easy to undo. So hopefully it helps. Yeah, very
Philippe Gamache 13:11
cool answer. I don't think it's as obvious maybe, for some folks to say that like, oh, you know, in marketing ops and martech, understanding marketing is key to success here. Because like maybe in startups, obviously, like oftentimes, these folks are wearing the same hat, the marketing ops person, and the marketer or the content writer, they're all wearing the same hat. But in the enterprise world and bigger companies, oftentimes those teams are very detached in the martech. Team and my parents, in my experience, I found, there's a lot of engineers, a lot of data engineers, a lot of analysts and folks that never wore the marketing hat, and they're servicing people that they've never worn their shoes, they don't really understand their world. So I think that's that's great advice, especially for folks in bigger companies. I wanted to ask you, you said that you checked out the episode we had with Sir McNamara as well. We did a bunch of deep dive on reverse TTL. And like the CDP, composable versus packaged battle, and I thought of deselect when I was looking back on some of those episodes, because I feels at least like from my perspective that you essentially build reverse ETL with the Select before it was this mass concept. And maybe it was a little bit too early for the market. But I wanted to ask you like how did you have this foresight of the types of features or maybe talk about like your your thoughts on the composable versus traditional platform architectures, considering that like you were pretty much a predecessor to composable rain?
Anthony Lamot 14:51
Right composable avona literature, like there was a in French it's a it's a very thoughtful question. I appreciate you asking it. So for So I love the idea of reverse ETL when that started becoming more of a hype, and a, you know, there was a lot of messaging around that and started really a couple of years ago, I was like, Oh, wow, this is awesome. It's really smart. But I also understand that we are very different. And now I will first say that yeah, so in deselect, we have a few modules are the module we're most well known for is segments. And essentially, what that is, is an intuitive drag and drop, generate SQL and execute it executed within your marketing automation platform. And we stuck with Salesforce, because multiple reasons, but amongst others, it's our background. Now, we have often toyed with the idea of adapting it to other platforms. In fact, I think, you know, we're still open to things like strategic partnerships to maybe apply the sequel generation bit or platforms. And this could be, you know, this, maybe automation platforms, reverse ETL solutions, even data warehouses themselves, even CDP's, or even CDP's. Um, having said that, I think there's a big philosophical difference. And what reverse ETFs do and they do a great is that, you know, they can tap into the wealth of a data warehouse, and then it can essentially stage data. And so I would say, there's somewhere somewhere at a staging layer, there to be consumed by marketers, who are then going to do campaigns of that at the execution layer. And that's the difference, we sit at the level of execution, our segmentation is embedded. And this is really, because that's where we saw the customer need for our customers, they need segmentation the level of their campaigns and want to be able to use the engagement data as it came in. And they didn't always have real time sync between their data warehouse, maybe CDP, or whatever. So that's what really drove that. Um, but, and there's, there's really, two reasons, by the way, why you do want to have something at the level of execution. And that's where we position our MRP or marketing optimization platform, first of organizationally. So reverse ETL tools have this curse less so than data warehouses and CDP's. Maybe, but typically, it's not the marketing team, maybe not even a marketing operations team that is managing this very, very often it is still the BI team, the IT team, or, you know, who knows, maybe in a third party. And what happens on organizationally is that the marketer, they go to the technical team, whoever they are, and they go like, make this segment, and then they already doing sprints, and I wait two weeks, and then they come back, and then they work on it. And then oh, wait, something was missing in the briefing. So you get this annoying, we call it targeting ping pong between two parties. And it just deteriorates your campaign velocity. And the thing that the main thing that gets missed is that the marketers don't learn to understand your data. And that makes them worse marketers. It's like this huge missed opportunity. And I see this over and over again, where marketers who get hands on with data become better marketers and are very happy. That's reason number one. That's organizational. Reason number two has to do with functional. So I had this had this conversation with a customer of ours, Major, fast moving consumer goods. You've used our products, maybe today. And, and so they were describing this use case where they want to do orchestration from the CDP. Okay, cool. Now, to a large extent, you can do that. And I know in their case, it's CDP but reverted to that will be a similar thing where you're talking about, where are you staging data? Anyway, so they were they were thinking about doing orchestration for certain journeys from the CDP. But it was super easy to poke holes into that. So imagine, for argument's sake, you push the data true. You got to journey with whatever, three, four or five sends doesn't matter. If I want to prevent the turret message in the journey to go out to say, Phil, how can I do that? Now? Yes, technically, you can do that you can create an API, you can create suppression lists. But if you have to do for every campaign for every sin for every use case, it is practically impossible, practically impossible. So you need something that can actually intervene at the level execution. And that's why I love reverse ETL I think it's a great idea. It's not us. We are different. We sit at the level of execution, and we sit there very comfortably creating tons of added value for our customers.
Philippe Gamache 19:02
Very cool. Great answer. Yeah, I want to I won't give I won't steal the credit for that question. I'll give a shout out to protect Desai. He, he's the one that poked me in the head. You on the air referred to have you on the show. And he was like, oh, you should ask Anthony about this. So yeah, really, really cool to hear your thoughts on that.
Anthony Lamot 19:22
Amazing Pratik is one of the smartest people I think I've met talking about this kind of stuff. I think I met him first in person. We flew into New York to meet them in person. And I think we spent four hours three hours in front of a whiteboard coming up with alternate architectures. I'm pretty sure I still have pictures of those whiteboards somewhere.
Philippe Gamache 19:41
Amazing. Those are probably worth a lot of money Sunday, you should sign them and print them as
Anthony Lamot 19:47
as long as they start from customer problems and not from great ideas. Maybe
Jon Taylor 19:53
I'm switching gears a tiny bit here, but you know, the idea of personalization and marketing. I wanted to ask you about this a little bit. I know I feel flooded with marketing messages with Chachi Beatty and genitive AI, I know it's a bit cliche, but marketing and marketing campaigns in my mind are becoming like very disposable. Like it's so cheap and easy to come up with something that's kind of pseudo, almost personalized. But I'm finding this is almost at this level of boilerplate marketing messaging. So I want to take it back a little bit and ask, just from your perspective, what is the true personalization of marketing? And how can marketing teams actually set themselves up for success with this type of human connection with their audience? Yeah,
Anthony Lamot 20:32
I mean, I totally recognize what you're saying, JT, I get so many spam emails, my finger is bleeding just from hitting this button over and over and over. So Well, first of all, I also think the question of what kind of personalization should we do is a great question that more marketing, marketing operation teams should ask themselves, before they start doing it, I feel a lot of this, a lot of decisions are Feature Driven, like, oh, we can use this content block. But I think you should take a step back and think about strategy. And one example that a good friend of mine once gave, this was a Toyota Japan, or at least the examples from Toyota Japan, where apparently after a few years, they would have a rep hit the streets, knock someone's door mean ex customers. And they would hand them a rose as a thank you for being a customer. Now, there was some smart stuff behind that campaign, too, because a lot of Toyota to also see, are people still driving a Toyota? For a manufacturer? It's kind of hard to keep track, right. But it was so personalized. I love this example, because it kind of breaks the frame and the mind even of many people in marketing operations. Because when we think about market operations, we think about, oh, super smart, dynamic content driven based on all the data integrate for multiple sources. But you know, that's great. That's fantastic. But real personalization is human touch. And that goes back to the strategy. Are you one on one personalization, like to to Japan's roses, apparently, one too few, which could maybe mean maybe make industry specific content. That's what we do for certain industries, right. Like we see a lot of engagement in financial services, higher education, all the models will be great. Create content for those for those parties, right, that's one too few. Or just one too many. There's nothing wrong with one too many. Right, especially if you're in b2c, it's probably well, it's going to be but I think that's question number one. And then from there, things will flow a little bit more easily and you can hopefully still see the forest between the feature trees vertical.
Philippe Gamache 22:26
I love the Toyota Japan example. I don't know if I'd be super excited about getting a rose at my front door. But you know, maybe, maybe an iPad or something a bit bit fancier. But the point of like, personalization is human touch like it's it's it's doing one to one stuff. This episode is brought to you by our friends at revenue hero, I can't think of anything worse than finding out a lead waited a week for a response from sales. That's why we recommend revenue hero, it's the easiest way to qualify leads based on Form Values or enrich data and route them to the right sales rep. Their product is packed with a bunch of behind the scenes superpowers that ensures qualified leads are assigned to the right reps following your custom round robin rules and sending key data back to your CRM. That means more qualified meetings for your reps. We all know they want more of those but more importantly, no more waiting time for your potential customers. They back all of this up with the best product support out there offering 24 Five support on Slack Connect for all customers, no matter your pricing plan. So if you want to 3x your conversions with the same traffic, go to revenue hero data yo and tell them we sent you your sales team will thank you for it. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at census the number one data activation and reverse ETL platform loved by Activision Canva Sonos notion and more. As you might know, I'm pretty opinionated that the future of martec is composable and that the single source of truth for your marketing data should be your data warehouse. Since this helps marketers solve an age old marketing problem getting real time complete access to your customer data without needing to write a line of code. Also, if you want your own face as a humans of martec style image, we're doing a fun monthly raffle with census for a personalized t shirt. Enter to win at get census.com/humans I know you guys think a lot about this idea of over messaging people and messaging fatigue. Your team ran a survey to analyze consumer behaviors related to marketing emails and you know main takeaway for me was people value promotions and you know, even though a lot of our fingers are bleeding from hitting the spam button, there is value in a good promo email at the right time, based on like some of the stuff you were doing online but there's too many emails and there's no So we've seen it differently than too many emails absolutely can harm your brand. So how do you recommend marketers to manage this message fatigue tipping point that you kind of looked at? And maybe you like, talk about the indicators that marketers should be looking at? And what thoughts do you have around like the saturation of emails? And why customers are just like, so damn exhausted about marketing emails these days?
Anthony Lamot 25:26
Yeah, great. Great question. Great way to frame it to the report you're referring to as an annual State of marketing report, we do we can find on our website for those are interested in. It's interesting to see how the trends evolve over time to for us. But to answer your question about saturation, and determining the right level of fatigue, are ideal to prevent that. So the way we see customers often do it wrong, is, Oh, it feels right to send three emails tops per week, it feels right to do one survey per week. I'm like, yeah, that feels right, but isn't true. So the right way to do it, or the better way to do it is to actually look at engagement opens, clicks, unsubscribes, or lack of opens and clicks, I think there's a lot of junk in people's database. And there's a lot of vanity metrics in saying, Oh, we sent we did a send to whatever, a million subscribers, but maybe 30% of them already checked out from beginning. But that's another subject. But based on the engagement, you can then determine ideal saturation levels. And what is really interesting is that, how big of an impact that makes that was counterintuitive to me personally, so we're all talking about personalization, we're all talking about targeting mean, obviously, we swear by it, too, because we've made tons of added value for our customers by offering functionality around it. But what I had underestimated, and actually it's, it makes sense when you think about is that timing is everything. So the moment someone receives a message is so key. So building that engagement is great. You could even take it a step further, if you have your buyer behavior, purchases, donations maybe. And ideally in the map in the in the marketing automation platform, again, at the level of execution. Now, sites and this data you can use to figure out, Okay, I'm gonna oversaturating people, however, however, it's not just about oversaturating. And that's the other thing I didn't expect when we set on this course, it's really going to look super shouldn't be too cold, it also shouldn't be too hot, right? If you like it, there's a perfect temperature here. And what we have found with some customers, one of them is actually a successor on our website, people can find it's a brain tumor charity, it's, it's a nonprofit. And they found by spreading out the communication, they were able to increase donations. So this is not just an efficiency bid. This is not just oh, I want to have less unsubscribes. This is actually a revenue driver. And it was pretty amazing. For me. Very
Philippe Gamache 27:44
cool. I wanted to ask you about like this idea of send time optimization, like I feel like you tease that out a little bit. These like ML powered send time optimization features in marketing automation platforms have been around for a while, right, like alongside like ML powered lead scoring. How, how valuable Do you think those have evolved to becoming today? And do you think that the future is like propensity based modeling for emails, like we've chatted with some folks on the cast who are consultants with big enterprise, and they've gotten a taste of those big enterprise companies, like we had Paul Wilson on the show who worked at Salesforce. And he was like, Salesforce doesn't do these like batch and blast campaigns, like there is no no marketer who was coming up with content, and then sends that out to a segmented list of people. There are marketers who create content. And then there is an ML machine and an AI machine that decides what content should be sent to what people at what time and what should the next piece of content be? And when should that be sent out? So I'm curious, your take there, like how much of your customers are still doing this, like rule based automation way of sending stuff where they're deciding, they're playing that Goldilocks looking at engagement data, deciding what the frequency is, versus just like, letting AI take the wheel? And maybe just like monitoring some of that stuff a bit? Yeah,
Anthony Lamot 29:15
I, I wouldn't be surprised if our customers that were fully doing it today, I think even with great AI needs to be a human centered as a decision making. So you don't have to change the name of your podcast just yet. But look, I think even in the companies that do have that level of maturity, honestly, there still was ad hoc segmentation happening thing, for instance, about events like there are timely activities where you cannot, you just cannot act fully automated. And that our customer base, it really depends on the industry. For instance, in higher ed, you have a lot of enrollments, a lot of timely data. And for that reason, you see a lot of ad hoc segmentation, it makes sense. In a tech company, we see a lot of customers that create segments and they automate them. It was really interesting to see on the usage graph they start off with like make some small ad hoc segments like, oh, this still works great. And then that ramps up, which, which tells us, okay, they've implemented as a standard process now. And then afterwards show me the automation shoots up when they realize, oh, I can automate all of this crap, right. And so that's what they do. I think central optimization to get back to the topic on, it's great. In Salesforce, or at least something built in called Einstein center optimization seems to work pretty fine. We integrate with it. And I think it can definitely add on. I think, the only tricky bit, there is, so many, many, many things in marketing operations. And marketing automation is how do you measure it, right. So we don't want to have to, maybe if you AB splits your journeys and have half of them go through centralization, or half not, that will be a way to do it. And I do think you have to measure that, if only because it's so freakin hard for mops, to explain the value they bring to the rest of the organization. And this has come up in many conversations with our customers. And obviously, we have to justify our value to our customers. It's a very complicated subject. Marketing, especially marketing operations is the most data driven function in a company and people underestimate that.
Jon Taylor 31:17
Super cool answer. I mean, we're already talking about it. But customer segmentation, I want to just get your take I know a deselect you guys help customers with segmentation strategies. But you know, when I was a marketing operations consultant, setting up these segmentation strategies, like, it sounds complicated to a lot of customers, but I think there's a crawl Walk Run approach that a lot of organizations who are successful with this, what do you see as the most common mistakes with folks on the ground? And how can people get up and running in a in a kind of a more sophisticated way? In this gen AI driven world?
Anthony Lamot 31:48
Yeah, um, love you Love that you point out the crawl, walk, run model. It's something I've been advocating since I was a consultant. So um, well, I think the number one thing is assuming you need perfect data. I've seen so many organizations have inertia or processes just coming to a stop because they felt they didn't have perfect data. But Newsflash, nobody does.
Speaker 1 32:13
Trust me this. It doesn't Yes, doesn't exist. There's no perfect data
Anthony Lamot 32:18
and what you need to and of course, I'm not saying you shouldn't do the government's data, cleaning data stewardship should do all of that stuff. And you should aspire to, quote unquote, perfect data, but it shouldn't stop in the meanwhile, what are you going to do not some campaigns, not segment aisle targets? Oh, we're not going to personalize because our data is not perfect. What will? What? So um, I think there's ways around that. And so what are your stay staging your data with reverse ETL or something like deselect immediately embedded in your marketing automation platform, there's weights recently to work around that, the one thing that I would say that you do need, and that might cause unfortunate delays for marketing operations, you do need good integration between your systems, not perfect again, but good enough so that you don't, you're not again, dependent on other teams do segments or create lists for you, which is the very old school way from the SAS days, when someone would make a list and send it over, I have no idea how that was, was made, right. So I do think good integration helps, if only for workflow, workflow, efficiency, and so on. But I mean, the idea of the marketing maturity model is something we are not just believing, we actively practice it at the select. And we've created our own tree and model, simply marketing maturity model, less of a mouthful. And what we've done is we've been able to map our whole customer base on basically this graph, personalization versus automation, of course, with a data lens to it. But basically, we can tell customers, this is you. This is how you compare to your industry to your edition of the select. And it's really cool because it spontaneously led to us doing and this is very new is very new, like only this year, we start doing this. Basically peer to peer virtual roundtables. For instance, we have one with higher ed, now we have one for the hospitality industry. And we're really bringing customers together, we're not charging for this, right? We're not charging for this just this is like a value that we bring to our customers. We love talking with our customers getting to understand them better. And we've seen there's tremendous value in connecting them. And then they can understand, Oh, why am I dangling at the bottom of that graph? And how do I get there? So how do I learn to walk or run? So that's it.
Philippe Gamache 34:28
Very cool. Love that idea of connecting customers from from similar industries because there's no shortage of sharing ideas and like we call it mind sharing at our company and like we're in such a niche industry. We're in the b2b to see model in Health Tech with HIPAA considerations and so many limitations with what we can do from a martech standpoint. So even just like picking the brain from someone at a similar type of business model is just like changing the way that we think so yeah, I love These like customer panels or he called them like peer to peer groups. So, this really cool. On this topic of Gen AI, like, we wanted to ask you a couple questions about Chad GBT, we've had a couple interviews with folks that had some really cool use cases for chat GBT, a lot of folks are using it for various things like, more than, like, cute category, like not super innovative. But some folks have some some pretty cool ideas, like we just chatted with someone, Steven Stouffer, who walked us through his presentation at Dreamforce, where he was basically connecting trade.io with your marketing automation platform and pushing that to chat GPD. So you could parse auto reply data. So like, think of all the manual stuff that you can leverage from like out of office responders, he's found a way to just like, send that over to Chad GBT and then do something with it, parse it, update job titles, update, like company names, and Salesforce or whatever. But Mandy Thompson walked us through how she's basically been able to push email replies to GPD to do sentiment analysis. So anyways, like the code snippets of some of the innovative stuff that we've seen, so I wanted to ask you like, what are some of the coolest use cases you've come across so far? With GPT?
Anthony Lamot 36:27
Um, that's a great question. Well, I don't know if these are the coolest first look at my personal life just for workout schedules, that's maybe I don't want but like there's something glaringly obvious stuff that you can do in your daily life for which you can use it. So that's, that was a fun one. Another one that I that was, that is very, you know, like recent for me, because right now a deselect, we're also removing continuous improvements. We're also rethinking how we do our marketing. And maybe this example will stand out a little bit, because it's not necessarily an ops example. It's more like a leadership organizational design example, I'm just engaging in conversation with Chad GPT in one chat, where, of course, it probably won't provide a lot of context on my role, the company where we are at, but I'm helping it, I'm using it to help me think through organizational design, going from roles and responsibilities, incentive structures, cross functional design, overall, GTM teams alignment, and it is surprisingly useful, of course, you have to be careful, because you can very easily steer towards a certain solution. That's not necessarily the right solution. So you almost have to teach it to be its own devil's advocate, if you can, and I found that really interesting. What I will recommend that is also another thing I haven't seen people really do a lot is that most people when they think of LGBT, they think of the the web version, get the app on your phone, and obviously just get the paid version because basically the price of a premium sandwich, but it's a fantastic tool, but the mobile version has a conversational assistants, and it does something, there's something about it about user experience when you're actually talking to the thing. At least for me, I'm, I'm a person who can you know, who can think by having conversations that really helps me sometimes. So that's a useful tool in that way, I would say. Um, so those are some GPT use cases that could maybe recommend
Philippe Gamache 38:22
nice I can see JT again, really up close to the mic. Getting excited about the the conversational piece there. And he's a big fan. It
Jon Taylor 38:29
ya know, I have, it's funny, you mentioned like three things that I use with GPT, the workout schedules, it's actually a great personal assistant that we're pro fitness assistant. I have a business coach as well. And then I have an infrared sauna. And oftentimes I'm talking with Josh up team, a very curious person, I asked him, like how the dinosaurs go extinct. What should I do for the next day is my business. But I think that it's interesting, right? Like that idea of using voice. And I just want to go on a tangent here a little bit and get your thoughts on this too. It's just like, once you start conversing with GPT, and having a talk back to like, there's something that happens, I don't know, in my brain that it becomes very personalized. And I don't know, the conversational element, I think is really interesting. And it makes me think about the future of digital assistants and how we can use AI. What are your thoughts, sir?
Anthony Lamot 39:18
Oh, man, how much how much time you have? So, look, I think the way these things work is because they kind of mirror what you're thinking. And that is because the way these things operate in my you know, self admittedly, superficial understanding is that it's their neural networks, just like your brain. Um, so how is going going to evolve? Look, let's get a little bit more futuristic here. I do think there's a few interesting trends that are happening in tech. In a very wide sense, if you look at what Elon Musk is doing with his least well known company, neuro link is probably gonna be the most impactful thing for humanity where people are essentially making brain machine interfaces you can link up your brain to um Whatever your garage door or somebody else do have a conversation, right? People don't understand just how much that is going to create is literally going to allow us to magic. Now what I've been thinking about and kind of brainstorm a little bit about is, what if we can do that. And we can connect each of our own brains to our own GPT. And we would essentially have more computing power. Like we could basically make every single human being on Earth smarter than all of humanity combined right now. I think that's literally what would make us superhuman, transhuman, whatever you want to call it. I think that's like, further down the long vision than maybe you anticipated in my answer. But I do see something happening in that direction.
Jon Taylor 40:44
Yeah, it's a really fascinating this idea of having your own personal digital assistant, I read this great article about this recently. It kind of was a little bit scary to be honest with you. I think there's probably some people who think Is this a utopia or a dystopia? And how this plays out is going to be fascinating over over over our careers in our lifetimes? Well,
Anthony Lamot 41:04
yeah, maybe maybe two people leaving in the medieval times today would be a dystopia.
Philippe Gamache 41:09
Yes. Or no, if you remember this, like the four part, the episode that we did on on AI, I think, part three, we were talking about, like a future world where, you know, what are the marketers jobs looking like, where AI is a lot more advanced. And one of those categories was this idea of a neuro marketing expert. And like you said, like Elon has kind of all over this, eventually, AI and neuroscience are gonna converge in a big way. And they're already are, and marketers could have access to like, massive insights into consumer behavior and decision making that seem like sci fi today. But like, think of like emotions and thoughts, things you can do today, like, obviously dive into, like neuroscience and marketing applications of the future to just get this idea of like the foundation of psychology and consumer behavior, and how different that could look in probably like a more near future world, and we're probably more comfortable to admit.
Anthony Lamot 42:10
Yeah, totally. I think it's literally we literally can't imagine it right now, we can't, but we should try to anticipate and also deal with the challenges that will inevitably creep up on us but, or jump on us even. Um, but it's super exciting. I do imagine like the future marketing operations person being some kind of wizard, but it's just using, you know, whatever AR device is most popular at that time to use their brain and just come up with campaign ideas. You know, bringing a little bit closer to to Dado, like, friends, what we're already seeing in these like, engages now people can plan their campaigns, and they can fully anticipate the saturation on those campaigns based on the data we have. So some fun ideas we're thinking about is for instance, like, Oh, what if what if we, you know, hit a button, and the way it will work is, you know, fill njt they come up with their 20 campaign ideas for the coming months, and they're just listed, and then the press a button, and the button plans it out for them in the way that most optimized, right? So it's just like, extension of your marketing capabilities. It's going to be pretty cool. I think.
Philippe Gamache 43:16
Wizards of martec tt, Anthony just validated your idea there.
Jon Taylor 43:21
I haven't I slack, Phil, all kinds of wild wild ideas, my ideas. My ambition in life is to be VP of sci fi somewhere, probably about my own company. But it seems like sci fi is coming true quicker than I could write it anyways. So here we are. One of the posts I saw on your LinkedIn. And I actually thought I kind of like nodded my head when I saw this was about and I know you're still working with an AI and your product, but like you pulled Chachi Beatty, and have a segment of your product, I believe. And I was thinking to myself like this is, first of all commendable. I think a lot of people are pasting AI on their products right now, where it doesn't have a great use case. And I think having these strong use cases and developing just like you did with your startup like this Lean Startup style of does this pass the sniff test? Is this past my mom test? Does it make sense to have GPT in the product? Do you want to share some of your takeaways of integrating with Chuck GPT? And how this is going to shape your approach to AI in the future?
Anthony Lamot 44:17
Yeah, thanks for pointing out that post. I'm glad I'm glad you liked it. Because I was actually it's, it's a very, it gives a very deep look into the company and our thinking but in in light of trust and transparency, I felt it was the right thing to write about that so publicly. Now don't get me wrong when LGBT, you know, became more of a thing. We also jumped on it right? I grew up my co founder, Jonathan and I like do we have to do something with this? If only to try it out, but we haven't now totally tried it out. And the conclusion is that it actually doesn't create that much added value for our customers. So for context, specifically, what we did is that I really explained that the Select segment that module allows you to create SQL with an intuitive interface. So we're like, Oh, what if you could just like scream at your laptop, what segment you want, and it would just come out. Great. Now as it turns out, because every data model is so different, there's so many edge cases, and it never comes out just quiet, right? And that Dettori eights, user experience and trust, right. But then even more to the point, you're actually not that much faster. It turns out our, our interface is already pretty intuitive and fast, and just much more detail oriented. So okay, unlimited value for customers, it feels already more than a gimmick than an actual value add. And then if you look at the engineering, that it takes, obviously a bit of a new domain for everyone. So it just consumed so many more engineering hours plus the open AI, API is still changing. Everybody knows that. So that makes it a bit harder to work with. So final conclusion, super cool, fun, interesting, we can probably do more value, adding stuff in the same amount of time. And that still goes back to our frequency optimization and engage. And we spoke about that. And, and I do want to clarify, like we still strongly believe in AI and different shapes and colors, but definitely including in terms of AI. We also still have our brands, DD AI, D, for those who don't know, is our little penguin mascot. And anyway, so that brand still exists and will continue to release features underneath it, including for engaged we have machine learning and machine learning driven predictions for the ideal saturation point per subscriber, we call it personalized saturation control. And I'll just say stay tuned for more. Awesome,
Philippe Gamache 46:38
I think there's a lot of companies that should follow in your footsteps there and remove the rightness with AI in their in their product. But I don't need to write with AI in your product just like I can in chat TPT right here on my desktop. But yeah, we're getting close on time. So yeah, I wanted to give you a chance to talk a bit more about what you launched earlier this year, you're calling it the marketing optimization platform thinks it's a bit of a change from how you were branding, the whole kind of slew of things that deselect was doing. But you've added a ton of capabilities to the Salesforce marketing cloud platform over the last five years. And something I found interesting. And what you teased a bit about earlier in the conversation is that you're open to this idea of building for Salesforce and beyond. But I think for now it's still Salesforce focused ecosystem, right?
Anthony Lamot 47:36
Um, well, yes, mostly like everything we do, and probably got that we start from customer need. And so we have discovered over time, hey, there's more capabilities here that actually make sense to for us to build because we just don't set out to build anything. But one thing that we've noticed is that customers would want to work cross channel, right. And within marketing cloud actually supports multiple channels, email, texts, mobile, but also channels beyond marketing cloud. And so for, for engage, for instance, so that the frequency optimization part we already saw need to integrate multiple channels. Overall, this has led us to breach the fact that, you know, we're no longer a point solution. That's how we started with the Select segment kind of haphazardly, almost. But we have really evolved in this multi capability platform. And I think just calling it an MLP resonates heavily with everyone in mops, because now you have your mop to clean out whatever else you have. It's also very distinct from a marketing optimization platform, we have no ambition, as far as I can tell, for now to start doing the execution of sense itself, we do plug in, we do integrate with that we make it super easy to work cross channel. And I'll give you an example. Right now we're working with a top three vaccine manufacturer and they are using like somebody in the pharmaceutical industry, they are using Viva CRM. And so what they wanted to see is what are the salespeople sending up? Bullet into the Select so that the marketing team can just their communication strategy based on that? So we're literally already today beyond sales for it, because yeah, thanks. So I would still say we're a Salesforce first company. Currently, most of our product development is oriented on that. And currently, most of our GTM is there. I would also say one other thing, the MLP thing. It's also interesting, because it's really, again from customer need, and one thing that I think actually your listeners might really appreciate is that late last year, Jonathan, I was set out to interview leaders and experts in marketing operations. And so we have conducted 57 in depth interviews behind closed doors. But we do have a report anonymous, of course, for confidentiality reasons, but we're about to release that to the wider audience. The participants already have it. They have a more extensive version too, but we're going to release a public facing version We're gonna do a webinar about that. It's going to be called the industry reports on mops, something to that tune and should be available soon.
Philippe Gamache 50:06
Nice. We'll make sure to link that out at the bottom of this episode by the time it drops. Maybe it'll be out already, but if not, we'll we'll add it when it does get released. So if you're listening to this, and you're curious about finding it, check out the show notes or the blog post version of this. GT ran us out with our last question. Yeah, this
Jon Taylor 50:26
has been a blast. Anthony, thanks so much for joining us. Tons of gratitude for the hour you got to spend with us. I'm thrilled to have an interview with you is an awesome, interesting podcast interview, I think. But one question we asked all of our guests. You're a co founder, a CEO, a novice camper, a techno EDM festival, frequent errs, you owe me some music recommendations after this. And one question we ask all of our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance? Yeah,
Anthony Lamot 50:54
um, thanks for asking. Um,
Unknown Speaker 50:56
first of all, I
Anthony Lamot 50:57
mean, we're not the best person to ask about balance. And I even I even think work life balance is maybe not the right phrase, especially when you're in tech, and especially not when you're an entrepreneur. So I like to think about work life integration, how your work and life flows into each other. Well, on the on, let's say, on the business side, which still gives me a lot of energy is not surprisingly, talking with customers, I generally do enjoy that I get energy out of that. And I think the moment as a founder you don't, it's going to be problematic, right? Because it's probably what you should be doing a lot. So that's on the business side. On the personal side. You know, I mentioned briefly, I have a background in psychology. And, look, there's only a few things that really make you happier. As it turns out, first money, but only up to a point, once you got your basic needs covered, it doesn't it really doesn't make a difference. And that's basically everyone listening to this podcast, it's not gonna make more of a difference, right? Second genetics, that kind of sucks, because at least for now, you can change it right. But it's what it is. Some people are just born literally born happier than others. So it seems. But then the other thing that I think are retained is from some TED talk I once saw, it was really interesting. And this is, this is really good psychological research into happiness. And takeaway was appreciation is one of the only things you have control over it can increase your happiness. So on that note, I would if I may do a little shout out.
Unknown Speaker 52:17
Yeah. Okay, great. Well,
Anthony Lamot 52:19
so I, one of the thing, we're all very appreciative for our customers, because we do work with fantastic brands and logos, like Volvo or Cornell. And we wouldn't be here without them. And then of course, our team. We make it look easy. But it's really not right, we really worked super hard. And I do want to recognize that many of our team members are just fantastic, hard worker smart. And, you know, not least amongst them, my co founder, Jonathan has been on this very wild, very exciting ride with us. And lastly, our investors, we have a great investor in our venture capital investor, lead investor adjacent, but a fantastic partner. And you know, we have multiple people as angels on our board who run unicorns themselves and being able to soak in that knowledge and know how it's been exhilarating. So thank you all. And this is making me happier.
Philippe Gamache 53:11
Love it. I think that's a great answer. Your appreciation is something that I think all of us could do a little bit more. I think a previous guest talked about like a gratitude journal where before bed every night, they write down three things that they're appreciative of, and they try to make it something different every time. And I do that after a month or so in the journal. And it's so yeah, that's, that's great advice. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you so much for your time today. It's a super fun chat.
Anthony Lamot 53:39
It's been great. Thank you guys.
Philippe Gamache 53:49
Folks, thank you so much for listening this far. We really appreciate you being here. Just wanted to call out two things before we go. Number one, the best way to support the show is by signing up for our newsletter on humans of martech.com. We send you a quick email every Tuesday morning letting you know what episode just dropped. We include our favorite takeaways, so if you don't have time to listen to that one, no pressure, we have you covered with some learnings anyway. And number two proceeds from sponsors this year to have allowed us to venture into video. We recently launched a YouTube channel where we publish full length episodes. So if you want to see our radio faces, check that out. That's it for now. Really appreciate you listening again. Thank you so much.