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"The goal is not to personalize everything. You need to personalize what matters so that you can prioritize it internally in order to execute it well." - Jacqueline
Scaling personalization in marketing technology remains one of the most persistent and painful challenges in the Martech landscape, and the data makes that brutally clear. Nearly 75% of buyers expect companies to understand how and when they want personalized interactions, yet 53% of companies admit they don't know when personalization is actually valuable. Only 12% of brands qualify as true leaders in this space. In the sixth and final episode of their Pain Points series, Jacqueline and Juan break down exactly why personalization keeps breaking down and what marketing technology leaders can do to fix it.
The conversation moves through three core failure modes: personalization without context, the speed-versus-scale trade-off, and the operational and cultural bottlenecks that quietly kill even the best-intentioned programs. From a global financial institution waiting six months to unlock a logged-in experience, to year-in-review campaigns that landed with a thud, the episode is packed with real-world examples of what happens when strategy and execution fall out of sync. The antidote isn't doing more — it's doing less, better, with sharper insight and tighter alignment.
Timestamps
00:33 — Pain point #6 introduced: scaling personalization, execution speed, and global complexity
02:09 — The data paradox: 75% of buyers demand personalization, but 53% of companies can't measure its value
04:38 — Why only 12% of companies qualify as true personalization leaders and what's holding the rest back
09:30 — The insight foundation: why every personalization program needs it
14:50 — The six-month Adobe Target story: when tech implementation has no personalization strategy behind it
20:21 — The execution problem hiding as a personalization problem and how centers of excellence can fix it
26:45 — Four solutions: prioritize moments that matter, simplify, build for speed, and align teams on shared incentives
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Brought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.
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Creators and Guests
What is Making Sense of Martech?
Unfiltered takes on the biggest shifts in marketing technology. We spotlight what matters, who's leading (or lagging), and what's next. In Martech, clarity is power — and we're here to deliver it.
00;00;05;01 - 00;00;08;06
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Making Sense of MarTech podcast. I'm Jaclyn Friedman.
00;00;08;09 - 00;00;10;07
Speaker 2
And I am Juan Mendoza, and.
00;00;10;07 - 00;00;30;08
Speaker 1
This is office Hours, and we cut through the noise and discuss the latest and greatest in the martech landscape. All right. It's six out of six. It's our final pain point and our pain point series. And I am really glad it's the last one, because everything as it relates to this pain point is contingent on the previous five.
00;00;30;10 - 00;00;33;02
Speaker 1
And what is this special number six?
00;00;33;04 - 00;01;06;21
Speaker 2
Special number six. Our very last one is all about scaling, personalization and execution speed balancing real time personalization. Campaign volume, global complexity, and pace of cultural change. This one is a really good one because as you say, Jax, this is personalization in often in martech is where everything ladders up to all that data problems that you have, the data silos, utilization of AI, determining ROI and outcomes, all of those things ladder up to what does a customer get at the end of the day.
00;01;06;24 - 00;01;13;13
Speaker 2
So I'm really excited to talk about this one because this is it's all heading up to this. What are you delivering for a customer and what's preventing and stopping that.
00;01;13;13 - 00;01;32;25
Speaker 1
And I think a lot of people can relate to a really large expectation gap between we're getting asked to deliver things in real time at hyper personalized experiences, at global scale, faster than ever. I mean, I've had to deal with that where I was like, hey, plan for a billion customers and all of these things just in case.
00;01;32;28 - 00;01;46;00
Speaker 1
And you're like, okay, I'll try. But it also makes so many questions. What is real time? I mean, no one has the same understanding, etc. etc. but I know we've got some interesting data if you want to chime in one.
00;01;46;02 - 00;02;09;03
Speaker 2
It's an interesting one. I mean, there's some really interesting data from the recent Forrester Research Project. They said nearly 75% of buyers expect companies to understand when, where and how they want personalized interactions. In fact, most studies over time there's been many on personalization kind of a point to this that customers actually really value and appreciate personalization, especially in own channels like email, website, things like that.
00;02;09;05 - 00;02;35;09
Speaker 2
They value it. It impacts their customer experience. It drives Greater Bend as well among customers. That's often the consensus academically. And among the research organizations, plenty of value. And I mean, personalization has been a concept. I mean, I remember around the start of last decade and, I remember my manager at the time, I was running AB testing, for a small agency and my, the owner of the agency, the manager came up to me and he said, oh, man, I've just I just saw this really cool use case.
00;02;35;12 - 00;02;50;13
Speaker 2
I think it was some fast food restaurant. And he said, oh, you know, they did this thing called personalization where they like, versioned the content based on the user, and they did it at scale and it did it for like, you know, 10 million customers. And and at that time, it blew my mind. You know, I was like, what?
00;02;50;13 - 00;03;06;19
Speaker 2
You can do that. That's amazing. You know, that was more than a decade ago to do. It's hard to do. Still very hard to do even from then to now. But I remember just how mind blowing this whole concept of personalization is, as if it was all sort of this came about. And now, you know, we're very much more the market is very mature around personalization.
00;03;06;19 - 00;03;24;16
Speaker 2
Everyone knows what it is. It's a table stakes thing. Now, I think in most companies, not the mind blowing amazing thing that happened, you know, that we were experiencing, more than a decade ago. But today it's very much a table stakes thing. But yet, overall, companies want to, want to personalize, the customer experiences because their customers appreciate that.
00;03;24;18 - 00;03;42;29
Speaker 2
But also, it drives greater, revenue outcomes, conversion goals, things like that. That's more or less a given, I think, academically. But here's the other flip of this data. 53% of companies say they don't understand when personalization is actually valuable. So flip the coin. Heads or tails. Take a guess. Is this use case going to drive ROI?
00;03;43;00 - 00;03;56;06
Speaker 2
Flip the coin. You know is this segment going to be value one. Flip the coin. And then another really interesting stat. 51% of decision makers in marketing technology say fully understanding customer context is absolutely critical. So there's this that's neat.
00;03;56;06 - 00;03;56;28
Speaker 1
Terrifying.
00;03;57;04 - 00;04;17;24
Speaker 2
Yeah it does and made. But like literally flip the coin again executive might care about this or not. So I most every other analyst firm research company even in academia say that personalization is definitely a valuable investment. But then half of folks that are in companies don't see, the value. I don't even know if it's actually valuable.
00;04;18;01 - 00;04;38;13
Speaker 2
And then I actually don't even understand it, which is another crazy stat if you put that in front of someone and really, it's it's disappointing. Yeah. And, you know, like, you've done some work in this area where, like, who's leading this, and so what's, what's the data that sort of speaks to how many people are actually how many brands leading personalization mean they can do this really well at scale?
00;04;38;15 - 00;05;05;02
Speaker 1
Well, seemingly 12%. And for us would qualify themself as leaders in this space. Meaning they can do this well at scale. I would say that's actually probably an exaggeration. I think very few really can be considered leaders where they have all of their data ducks in a row. It does not require consistently asking analytics team or pulling a SQL query because they don't have the segment.
00;05;05;02 - 00;05;28;21
Speaker 1
It's a troubling statistic because as we've been talking about it for so long and no one's figured it out, and it's because they haven't done the previous five pain points of navigating the principles, the foundational components. Without a foundation, you don't have a house. And in the last episode, we were talking about AI and how if you build on sand, that's not going to end so well.
00;05;28;24 - 00;05;56;17
Speaker 1
So all of this has to do with that foundation. And also your customers are already expecting this personalization. Like this is a table stakes as you've mentioned. And instead oftentimes outside of the rare examples like Spotify, granola, Grammarly is, you know, weekly or annual reviews. Outside of those, it's just companies producing noise. And this past year was the first time a lot of companies finally kind of did a Spotify wrapped.
00;05;56;20 - 00;06;16;11
Speaker 1
And it got to the point where folks were like, this isn't even interesting anymore. That's so ten years ago. Yeah, unless you bring something fresh and new to it, which I will say, granola did a great job of doing that. But outside of that, it's actually not interesting. Like you need to bring something to the table that is impressive if you're going to personalize.
00;06;16;11 - 00;06;20;19
Speaker 1
Otherwise, it's a waste of data credits and your customer's time.
00;06;20;26 - 00;06;43;16
Speaker 2
Absolutely, absolutely. A lot of noise, a lot of waste, a lot of lockers, a lot of time wasted as well, just waiting to get things off the ground with personalization. You know, there's still, I think, even today there, I think we really, you know, say 15 years into proper enterprise personalization, we're still scratching the surface. I think that most opportunities haven't been fully uncovered or understood.
00;06;43;16 - 00;07;10;06
Speaker 2
You know, the thing with personalization is, like the more you do it, the more opportunities you find. It's one of those things where it fades, it fades in size and fades in ID ideation and those. And then with a company does it really well. It influences not just your digital experience, but the product. It it influences pricing. It influences your corporate strategy of saying personalization outcome decks like, you know, this is what we've achieved, go straight to a board sometimes because of how important it can be.
00;07;10;08 - 00;07;29;05
Speaker 2
And yet companies keep falling over themselves trying to make this work. So Jacqueline, you kind of you've sketched out three core problems that, limiting the ability to scale personalization and do it really well. What are those problems? I'd love to walk through them, but then maybe we could talk a bit about how marketing technology leaders can actually overcome some of these big problems.
00;07;29;08 - 00;07;56;11
Speaker 1
Yeah, the quick hits of the three. So the reason why personalization is breaking is it's without context. It's over personalizing it doesn't quite make sense as well as speed versus scale trade off. Does it just mean you have more campaigns and more things to manage or something else? And then thirdly, operational and cultural bottlenecks, approval flows, all of the ins and outs inside of a company that are just not structured for this.
00;07;56;13 - 00;08;18;10
Speaker 1
So let's dive in a little deeper. So with personalization without context, of course, mentioned the examples of a year in review where it just it doesn't land because actually bad personalization is worse than no personalization. You're having your customers talk about something you don't want them to talk about. And it also just means you're misreading the intent behind things.
00;08;18;10 - 00;08;46;29
Speaker 1
And it's similar to in our AI discussion where we say, would this be a problem if you took AI out of the equation? It's kind of like, okay, are we solving for a personalization problem? Instead of should we solve for a personalization problem? And this is far beyond the table stakes of first name, last name, and birthday. You know, those are bygone, bygone eras of if you haven't thought of that out, well, something else is awry and amiss.
00;08;47;01 - 00;09;30;12
Speaker 2
Yeah. I think whenever we've. So I used to run quite a few different personalization programs for a whole all different industries, nonprofits, travel, finance, retail, and all different ways. And what I learned over time was that if your personalization program doesn't have a foundation of insights. So what I mean by that is, you know, actually going into your CRM, going into your analytics, your web performance and analyzing your customer behavior and analyzing what they're spending or the segments that really matter to you without finding those insights, like what I would say to get that personalization program going, you probably need 5 to 10 moments, which is, oh, the customer really needs this, but
00;09;30;12 - 00;09;52;12
Speaker 2
we're not. So serving them this, you know, something as simple as, oh, we didn't put 30 day returns higher up on the on that product page. You know. And that's the reason why customers are getting scared into buying, you know, peace of mind without those moments and tracing that back to, oh, okay, if we solve this we can see a conversion lift or we can see, you know, a lifetime value shift or a lack of a reduction of churn.
00;09;52;15 - 00;10;09;16
Speaker 2
And if you don't have that foundation of insights to start with, then it's really hard to substantiate and actually figure out what you want to do, because every time you go into an ideation session for personalization, I've seen this a million times and you get like the cross-functional team together, everyone's there. Okay, product marketing.
00;10;09;16 - 00;10;11;21
Speaker 1
Three hours, you know, mapping out.
00;10;11;23 - 00;10;26;09
Speaker 2
Yeah, mapping it out. Back in the old days, you know, I'm an old bloke now. Back in the old days, you have a big whiteboard with a butcher's paper and you put the sticky notes on there and then you get and then you finish the all happened. So I thought, well, you know, these is I just use Miro.
00;10;26;09 - 00;10;40;09
Speaker 2
But back in my day, I mean, I remember in my know, I was my first few roles leaving a client's office with like a big stack of butcher's paper like this thick, you know, and it's like, how am I going to record all this? No. Literally walking out the door.
00;10;40;09 - 00;10;42;02
Speaker 1
And the person makes it easier now.
00;10;42;05 - 00;11;13;18
Speaker 2
But those are those are like falling down on the ground as I'm walking across the street and I'm like, geez, that could be like $1 million idea, you know, without this, like personalization, foundation, which is insights, you know, getting ideas from the team is great. Don't get me wrong. You got to hear them out. But if you don't tie that back to a real customer insight and the create that chain between data insight initiative or experiment personalization campaign and then back to and then resolving it back to that initial insight like like every good personalization.
00;11;13;21 - 00;11;32;21
Speaker 2
Use case starts with a hypothesis. As you say, Jacqueline, you need context. If you don't have that context, then you don't have a hypothesis. If you don't have a hypothesis, then you really don't have anything in personalization. What you do have is an idea, but you'll never be able to measure it back to success. And so, you know, that's that's sort of our thesis.
00;11;32;21 - 00;11;53;02
Speaker 2
Every single personalization campaign we ever did when I used to work in the space, like on tools would be, what's your one page hypothesis? What's your data, what's your insight? And then how do you measure. And so that's kind of how I treat the context thing. It all starts with insights. It really does. And that comes with a real curiosity to understand your customer sit in their shoes for a little bit and understand their experience.
00;11;53;02 - 00;11;55;14
Speaker 2
If you don't understand it then nothing could help you.
00;11;55;17 - 00;12;18;08
Speaker 1
Yeah, and on that it's okay to have the hypothesis be wrong. That's why you test it before you actually commit. And that's where really the speed versus scale tradeoff can come into play as well. Like don't start with multiple channels. Don't start with multiple campaigns. Start with one, start small and see if it works. Maybe it works for certain markets, you name it.
00;12;18;10 - 00;12;42;21
Speaker 1
However, of course this comes up against a really tricky component in this era. But also always kind of in this era is limited resources, manual workflows, fragmented tooling, all of the things we're very aware of. And this is not even including like data accessibility. Do we even have this data that's actionable? And do you even have those insights.
00;12;42;24 - 00;13;08;20
Speaker 1
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00;13;08;20 - 00;13;25;16
Speaker 1
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00;13;25;17 - 00;13;50;22
Speaker 2
Like personalization programs of work or a forcing function for, integration and orchestration of tools because it's the sort of it's the logical commercial endpoint for getting that stuff right. No one goes, oh, we need to integrate our customer data platform with our CMS. No one says that to just do it. You know, like, who cares if it's not going to do anything for your business, then don't do it.
00;13;50;29 - 00;13;52;20
Speaker 2
You know, and often it gets.
00;13;52;27 - 00;13;54;08
Speaker 1
I think have those use cases.
00;13;54;08 - 00;14;15;26
Speaker 2
Exactly what we're doing. We're integrating our customer data platform with our CMS because we want to do personalization, you know, and so there's an interesting argument here to say well yeah. To your point. Like start with start really small. If you're starting out, if you're much further down the track and they'll overwhelm with complexity, which most people are, you know, how do you pull back, you know, and simplify, simplify, simplify.
00;14;15;29 - 00;14;31;00
Speaker 2
But often we get to a point where we have this real pie in the sky use case where we want integrate seven different systems. And, you know, there's all this dynamic content going on and, you know, just a lot of complexity and chaos. And then you get to actually building it. And then you're like, this is almost impossible.
00;14;31;03 - 00;14;50;24
Speaker 2
We can't integrate the different systems. You know, we can't do that. There's too many bottlenecks. I'll tell you this story. It's a really interesting one where we're working with a global financial institution, and their marketing technology stack was decided and built in the US, but we were working with another market and that other market. We built out a personalization strategy.
00;14;50;24 - 00;15;11;27
Speaker 2
So we built that that foundation of insights. And then we said, hey, the biggest opportunity is actually in the logged in experience for the user. So the user logs in and then they can do their financial activity. The biggest bang for Buck, without a doubt, was making that experience better and nudging them towards certain tools and products. So we did all that analysis.
00;15;11;27 - 00;15;29;21
Speaker 2
We built the use cases and then they had Adobe at that time. They said, this is great. Adobe Target, the experimentation platform that we're going to run the personalization campaigns out of. They said it's implemented everywhere except for the logged in experience. And so and so I said, and I.
00;15;29;21 - 00;15;32;07
Speaker 1
Said I just like stomach drop.
00;15;32;14 - 00;15;48;25
Speaker 2
And, you know, our outlook was, you know, 10 million incremental revenue, top line incremental revenue over 12 months for pursuing this program works. I wasn't small and it was, you know, a lot of and I was just getting started. So anyway, I went and said, all right, let's go talk to the Adobe team in the US. When I talk to them, I said, oh, sorry about that.
00;15;48;25 - 00;16;05;22
Speaker 2
We rolled that out across everything and it was uniform and there was no real strategy. We just rolled it out. Cool. All right. That makes sense. Now that why there was no strategy in forming that technology rollout for Adobe Target? I asked them, hey, do you want to do this? How long would it take to actually build this experience?
00;16;05;22 - 00;16;26;25
Speaker 2
In the logged in, portal for the customer, they said, it's going to take six months. Oh, gosh, six months. Really? Like, we're going to have to wait another six months to realize any value here. And that is exactly what happens in a lot of personalization. The tech team will go and implement things and set things up in a specific way for whatever justification.
00;16;26;27 - 00;16;45;02
Speaker 2
Very rarely will they have a personalization strategy in front of them saying, we need it integrated in this way, in this specific scenarios to deliver the ROI the business needs. And I think that's kind of this speed of a scale trade off is that, yeah, sometimes you're dealing with a basically whatever the team is set up and built.
00;16;45;02 - 00;17;03;16
Speaker 2
But the solution to that isn't just, you know, trying to find workaround and hacks. It's actually going back and saying, this is our strategy. This is what tech needs to do to enable it, as opposed to dealing with whatever you're being served up from, from the tech team. You know, so, you know, it slows you down. It slows you down because speed is like, you know, oh, let's go start this, start this.
00;17;03;16 - 00;17;14;25
Speaker 2
But without that foundation of insights and direction, and you're not going to have the opportunity that you might want out of it. You know, you call it like running, like running a global newsroom. Explain me that metaphor because that's really interesting.
00;17;14;27 - 00;17;47;11
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's it's kind of like running a global newsroom with a spreadsheet and three people, like, all right, we can totally do this. However you. No, no, you. Yeah. And it kind of builds into the next real problem here is to your point, teams are not structured for speed majority of the time. And that is multifold. That is not just global versus local geographic tension headquarters versus not different countries is I mean, nothing bothers me more.
00;17;47;11 - 00;18;15;00
Speaker 1
I've been at companies where certain countries or cities are considered different tiers, and it's like we should figure out a better term for identifying tier one versus tier three locations in the world. Like that's not acceptable versus not just brand and legal constraints, because if you're in a highly regulated industry, personalization is basically not an option. If you want something to get out the door, like you have to wait 3 to 6 months to do anything.
00;18;15;02 - 00;18;36;06
Speaker 1
And so it makes sense why a lot of our largest enterprises don't personalize very much, because it's too hard, it's too impossible. And it's not even just for the team not being structured for speed. It's almost built in. It's baked in to not be able to do it. And so there's always, of course, the fear of just incorrectly doing it.
00;18;36;09 - 00;18;53;06
Speaker 1
I mean, it still happens to the best companies where your first name gets it wrong. I had it happen to me with a vendor last week and I make them. I was like, hey, my name's not Karen, by the way. I'm like, oh no. And, they fixed it for the world.
00;18;53;09 - 00;18;53;26
Speaker 2
00;18;53;29 - 00;19;16;13
Speaker 1
Yeah. But it's just like you. You know who I am, I promise you. I mean, your system. Yeah, but yeah, it's just all of these different components that come into play and really block the best of the best on the martech side from being able to do what they can accomplish. Because in your head, you can do a lot.
00;19;16;15 - 00;19;21;01
Speaker 1
And it's just what are all of the different hurdles you have to bypass to make it possible?
00;19;21;05 - 00;19;41;06
Speaker 2
Absolutely. And, you know, I think I think we have this circle around this idea that, you know, the real truth, yo, is that most companies don't have a personalization problem. They actually have an execution problem. You know, they have too many things going on, too many campaigns, too many variations, no clear prioritization, no hierarchy for measurement, you know, no basis of insight to, to form that around.
00;19;41;06 - 00;19;59;13
Speaker 2
I think that it's like most people we talk to Jacqueline on a day to day basis. The brand side folks, it's been very rare and a while now since I've met someone that hasn't been overwhelmed by personalization, where the conversation literally isn't. Man, there's so much stuff going on, I have no idea what to do with this. I'm like getting migraines every day and I'm struggling big time.
00;19;59;20 - 00;20;21;23
Speaker 2
But that is the therapy sessions that happen constantly, with the companies that we work with. And it's because of this lack of direction and the unwillingness to say no and to focus on the personalization that really matters to business. You know, I've seen organizations do this so well, and the big thread is that they say no constantly.
00;20;21;29 - 00;20;43;18
Speaker 2
It's like all the ideas that different product teams have now, you know, I used to work in a, a company where we were triaging experiments, personalization campaigns for like about 15 different product owners. And, the program did pretty well because we triage them and said, hey, you product owner for this, and you product owner for this, you want the same thing, you know, can we just shift it, announce.
00;20;43;24 - 00;20;59;12
Speaker 2
Yep. Or like you guys conflict. So one of you have to duke it out and say we say and figure out who does that. But yeah, that personalization often works pretty well with the center of excellence. And that's where God, like the CEO will bring these folks together and go, okay, what does everyone want to personalize? All right.
00;20;59;12 - 00;21;25;11
Speaker 2
What is the different programs. What's the sequencing. And then that sequencing bit where you can manage all those requests and those priorities and bring it into a, sort of a singular view that can really take the pressure off. I think a lot, you know, we used to call it and the companies I work, the scrum of scrums, which is a bit of a agile terminology, but a sort of a center of excellence, where you're coming together and you discussing and prioritizing together can really take the overwhelm out of personalization programs.
00;21;25;13 - 00;21;26;09
Speaker 2
We've seen it work before.
00;21;26;10 - 00;21;53;08
Speaker 1
Oh, yeah. And I've seen it in pods and all sorts of different variations similar to you. And yeah, if you aren't all aligned and also if you don't have some sort of centralized and I don't mean gatekeeper in the negative sense, I just mean someone who is checking everyone's ID and making sure they're allowed to enter. And then from there you can have that informed conversation of, okay, these are the company objectives.
00;21;53;10 - 00;22;15;23
Speaker 1
These are things we're trying to accomplish. Which of these might actually ladder the best. And let's go all in on this said. For example. But we're kind of skipping ahead already to some solutions. Yes, of course. And because it's just there's so many options of how to make it work and hopefully achieve more than 12% leaders in the personalization space.
00;22;15;26 - 00;22;50;20
Speaker 1
And so I think we've we've alluded to it this whole time, but you really need to prioritize moments that matter. And to that point of the logged in experience that matters. But not every interaction requires personalization. And you really need to identify those key insights having high impact touchpoints and truthfully, personalization. So only as powerful as the intention, focus on what will bring value to the customer and you will be in the right place as it relates to personalization.
00;22;50;25 - 00;22;52;21
Speaker 1
Yeah, but what else can we do?
00;22;52;23 - 00;23;14;03
Speaker 2
Yeah. On that point, relating personalization. I want you to do us a favor tomorrow morning. Get the PDF of your customer journey up and then get some data to that will tell you what is the biggest drop off in that journey. It's so simple where the customers drop off. Did they drop off at court? Do they drop off a check up to the drop off at the product page in a ecom example?
00;23;14;05 - 00;23;34;12
Speaker 2
Do they drop that drop off when they log in to the app? Do they drop off, you know, find out where the friction is highest for the customer and figure out what what you can do to solve that. Because friction kills sales, it kills conversions. It sounds so simple, but if you can rank from 1 to 10, the highest friction points for the customer experience and work on that, you're just going to win.
00;23;34;19 - 00;23;54;12
Speaker 2
You're really are. You know, there's not going to be a moment where you go, you know, usually those high friction points have enough data to give you equal significance as well. So prioritize, if you don't, it doesn't have to be a 17 workshop with seven consultants involved to figure that out. You can sit down with your team and your analyst folks and figure that out in a day.
00;23;54;15 - 00;23;57;04
Speaker 2
It doesn't take long, but that's that can really help.
00;23;57;10 - 00;24;23;08
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, and your product managers should know that already. They should know what the most significant friction point is. And so from there, it's cranking and kind of circling back to let's go for the highest impact, at least difficult to start and gaining that trust of see if we do it this way, we will be able to personalize and increase the value of whatever conversion point you're looking for.
00;24;23;11 - 00;24;24;07
Speaker 1
Absolutely.
00;24;24;07 - 00;24;43;10
Speaker 2
But yep. Moving on to the second one leads us yes to simplification. Simplify. Yes. You know, you scale personalization not by doing more things by actually doing less better. Absolutely. That is true. Don't believe the hype that you have to do all channels and you have to do seven things in all the different channels. I don't know why I'm picking seven as a lucky number.
00;24;43;18 - 00;25;05;25
Speaker 2
I guess I'm just choosing seven and 17 today as my numbers. But you don't need to do everything at every channel, do less. Personalization doesn't need to expand its scope to scale. You can actually scale up because scaling is all about impact and effort. So if your impact goes up but the effort to run personalization goes down. You congratulations.
00;25;05;25 - 00;25;26;14
Speaker 2
You are now scaling personalization. People think that scaling personalization means doing a lot more in different channels. No it doesn't. It actually means creating misalignment from the input to the output, the work and the effort and the investment, and then the overall commercial outcome, customer experience outcome. That's what we're after here. So if you can make your life easier and this kind of goes into the third point as well.
00;25;26;14 - 00;25;43;03
Speaker 2
Jacqueline about building for speed, you know, setting yourself up. You've got some great points here about modular content creator workflows. You know, building for speed is part of this story. Do less so you can run faster. You can't run faster if you're doing more channels, different campaigns, and adding more complexity.
00;25;43;03 - 00;26;11;26
Speaker 1
Yeah, without a doubt. And that's where clear processes, systems, templates, modules, you name it, having that exist already just means you've got the building blocks to be able to do it at a faster pace, regardless of resources. Regardless of complexity of personalization. It should actually be pretty simple. It shouldn't be that hard. But yes, we have to fully look at it from what's going to remove friction for the customer and how do we do that?
00;26;11;26 - 00;26;45;12
Speaker 1
The cost benefit analysis of internal effort versus the output and outcome. And it's always a little bit tricky. But last but not least, I would be remiss if we neglected. It is not always easy working on a global team. It is challenging. It is fun. The sun rarely sets if it does at all on the company. And so as a result, you really have to start figuring out what can be centralized and what can remain decentralized, and what can be part of a specific geographic area or local community.
00;26;45;12 - 00;27;07;27
Speaker 1
First is what would make sense from a broader perspective. And there's a lot different theories and approaches to do you have a decentralized team? Do you have a centralized team that has that core overarching thematic component, and then you allow the local teams to do what they want to do? There's a lot here that you have to take into account, but that's where I'm a big RACI fan.
00;27;07;29 - 00;27;22;23
Speaker 1
Give me a RACI every day of the week. You want to define ownership. You want to define who oversees. I've heard I don't like the term, but who's the bus driver? Who's the one driving the singular bus that everyone's a part of? But it's solely responsible.
00;27;22;23 - 00;27;24;13
Speaker 2
Absolutely. Yeah.
00;27;24;16 - 00;27;25;06
Speaker 1
Yeah. My favorite.
00;27;25;06 - 00;27;46;25
Speaker 2
But yes, but it's interesting. Yeah. This, aligning alignment is a massive because personalization by nature is just cross-functional. You know, you need many different teams working together. And so creating that alignment is one probably one of the biggest challenges here, I think beyond everything else. We've talked about these alignment between groups, especially around the incentives. You know, Charlie Munger once said famously, and I think it's so true.
00;27;46;27 - 00;28;04;03
Speaker 2
Show me the incentive and you and I'll show you the outcome. Yeah, alignment is about incentives. It's about why people are, in the business, what they're trying to achieve with their own teams, and how that builds up into the overall outcome. You can't go into these things and say, we want to do personalization. And guess what? You're gonna have to do all this extra work.
00;28;04;03 - 00;28;19;19
Speaker 2
You get no credit for it. You don't you know, people don't do things out of the kindness of their heart. Sadly, in our day and age, especially in business, you know, no one's going to sit there and say, yeah, I'm going to sit down and spend three months building out the data capabilities for personalization. And it has nothing to do with my team and the incentives of our team.
00;28;19;21 - 00;28;39;24
Speaker 2
No one's going to do that. So underneath alignment is incentive management and actually giving the teams an ability to go back and say, if we do this and work on this project, this is our pay day, this is the outcomes. You know, people want to get promoted. People don't want to spend a bunch of times the things that, things I don't want to get promoted for, you know, they want to get recognition for the work they do.
00;28;39;26 - 00;28;48;02
Speaker 2
You know? And so your job as a leader often is to give them that reason to say, yes, you know, and come to the table.
00;28;48;02 - 00;29;19;14
Speaker 1
It's the translation like we're talking, you know, global versus local in so many ways. But also it's literally just translating what language do they need to hear and how it's going to benefit themselves or their team or their scope and responsibilities and yeah, not to mention like you'd be a great peer review come annual review time. Do it's a it's a two way street, but you have to make sure you're thinking about it beyond your own specific use case, your own specific personal project you want to build.
00;29;19;17 - 00;29;32;18
Speaker 1
It needs to be much broader and you have to bring people in because alignment is not easy or to build trust. And if trust isn't there, you're not going to have a great time. Let's just say that very much.
00;29;32;25 - 00;30;01;25
Speaker 2
So those are the four. Those are our four biggest pieces of advice working across so many different personalization programs. Seeing this upfront, and also the insights that we collect from our members. Prioritize moments that matter. Simplify your system. Optimize for speed, which also feeds into simplicity, and then align your teams and incentives around a shared strategy. But Jacqueline, as we close out our final episode on the six main challenges in marketing, technology and the leaders in it, what is your final thoughts here around personalization?
00;30;01;27 - 00;30;25;15
Speaker 1
There's a lot of directions we can go in, but I think the most succinct would be something along the lines of the goal is not to personalize everything. Just remember that you don't need everything with your initials and your name and your title, all that kind of stuff. You need to personalize what matters so that you can prioritize it internally in order to execute it well.
00;30;25;17 - 00;30;40;17
Speaker 1
And if you're not thinking about what your customer wants the whole time, why personalize is because they're not paying attention or they don't care. So look for the insights and look for the moments. What else do you have on your on your closing out thoughts?
00;30;40;23 - 00;31;03;00
Speaker 2
My closing out thoughts for personalization is at the end of the day, personalization is an experience that you're delivering. It's just as important as the product. And then the price, the experience matters. Just as much traded at is with as much care and attention and value that you would treat the product. They would treat, how you price, how you would treat customer service.
00;31;03;06 - 00;31;21;27
Speaker 2
Personalization is that important, that critical, getting it right can really transform your business. And so it's worth it. And it's worth your executives taking notice of that. And your team's getting around a shared vision for personalization. So that's my closing thoughts is a world of opportunity for you there. But as we close out, thank you for listening to Making Sense of My Tech podcast.
00;31;22;02 - 00;31;35;21
Speaker 2
If you'd like to follow us, you can join us on YouTube and like and subscribe that. We're also on Tick Tock now, which is awesome. Woo hoo! And then also on, LinkedIn, you can follow us on there making sense of my tech page there. But for now, let's stay curious.