RR005: Value metrics vs vanity metrics with Carlos Corredor, Condor

Realities Remixed, formerly known as Cloud Realities, launches a new season exploring the intersection of people, culture, industry and tech.

Technology and AI are rapidly transforming marketing, challenging old assumptions and shifting the focus toward analytics‑driven precision, smarter segmentation, and multimodal content. As attention becomes harder to capture and creative workflows evolve, the real advantage lies in adapting for an AI‑first environment, especially by rethinking overlooked segments like the mid‑market and being far more specific in strategy and execution.

 

This week, Dave, Esmee, and Rob are joined by Carlos Corredor, founder and CEO of Condor, to discuss the difference between value metrics and vanity metrics in modern marketing and why many organisations still struggle to connect marketing activity to real business results.

 
TLDR

00:32 – Introduction

00:59 – Hang out: Staying healthy

06:10 – Dig in: The valuable to measure with metrics

17:52 – Conversation with Carlos Corredor

47:15 – Looking ahead to the World Cup football

 

Guest

Carlos Corredor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlos-corredor-condor/

Hosts

Dave Chapman:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/

Esmee van de Giessen:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/esmeevandegiessen/

Rob Kernahan:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-kernahan/

Production

Marcel van der Burg:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcel-vd-burg/

Dave Chapman:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/chapmandr/

 

Sound

Ben Corbett:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-corbett-3b6a11135/

Louis Corbett:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-corbett-087250264/

 

'Realities Remixed' is an original podcast from Capgemini

Creators and Guests

Host

Dave Chapman

Chief Cloud Evangelist with nearly 30 years of global experience in strategic development, transformation, program delivery, and operations, I bring a wealth of expertise to the world of cloud innovation. In addition to my professional expertise, I’m the creator and main host of the Cloud Realities podcast, where we explore the transformative power of cloud technology.

Host

Esmee van de Giessen

Principal Consultant Enterprise Transformation and Cloud Realities podcast host, bridges gaps to drive impactful change. With expertise in agile, value delivery, culture, and user adoption, she empowers teams and leaders to ensure technology enhances agility, resilience, and sustainable growth across ecosystems.

Host

Rob Kernahan

VP Chief Architect for Cloud and Cloud Realities podcast host, drives digital transformation by combining deep technical expertise with exceptional client engagement. Passionate about high-performance cultures, he leverages cloud and modern operating models to create low-friction, high-velocity environments that fuel business growth and empower people to thrive.

Producer

Marcel van der Burg

VP Global Marketing and producer of the Cloud Realities podcast, is a strategic marketing leader with 33+ years of experience. He drives global cloud marketing strategies, leveraging creativity, multi-channel expertise, and problem-solving to deliver impactful business growth in complex environments.

What is Realities Remixed?

From the award‑winning team behind Cloud Realities, Realities Remixed explores what happens when people, culture, industry, and technology collide, because real breakthroughs rarely come from technology alone.
In each episode, hosts Dave Chapman, Esmee van de Giessen, and Rob Kernahan dig beneath the surface of innovation to understand what’s truly shifting. They speak with leaders, practitioners, vendors and thinkers across industries to explore how technology reshapes human behaviour, organisational culture, and society, for better and sometimes for worse.

Web - https://www.capgemini.com/insights/research-library/cloud-realities-podcast/
Email - [e-mail]

So it's not guesswork, after all it turns out you can take an analytical and scientific It is scientific, it's not just art. hang on, you can connect all the data points. What?

(00:22.03)
I'm Dave Chapman. I'm Esmee van de Giessen. I'm Rob Kernahan. And this is Realities Remixed, an original podcast from Capgemini. And this week, measure everything they say. But how do we make sure that what we're measuring is actually driving the value? Now joining us later on the show to talk about this, I'm delighted to say is Carlos Corredor founder and CEO of Condor.

the digital marketing agency. So we look forward to talking to Carlos a bit later on in the show. And if you want to skip right to that in the show notes, you will find the time code so you can just go right to our very instructive conversation with him. Before that though, I mean, it pains me to say it Esme, pains me to say it. Rob has made a useful recommendation. Let's first talk about it and then decide whether it's useful.

I'm a bit worried Dave about you trying to lull me into a false sense of security here. You're being overly nice and I'm a bit suspicious now. you know, a new show and everything. Yeah. Is it like a new year's resolution 2026? More like how many episodes of Reality is Remixed can we do before I lose my patience with Rob? I would have thought a quarter of one would have been the answer there. I would say so far so good.

So far so good. On one of the episodes we've recorded, you even had data. I know. mean, look at that. mean, come on. This is unprecedented work. Surprising. Anyway, so Robert and I were talking about dry January and things like that back a few weeks back. And I was saying actually one of the things that I'm doing is just like quite enjoy just like a big bottle of sparkling water. And he's, he was like, David, have you tried? This is my best Rob impression. David, have you tried?

Immuno tablets. I don't like, I haven't. Anyway, so like, you know, like a little Barocca or whatever. And they do an immuno version. Anyway, Robert, you've got all the facts and figures. Why is it a good thing? Well, it's, it's loaded with vitamin A, C, D, E, B6, B9, B12, energy fatigue, zinc, copper, iron, all of that. But there is actually science. You know, when you're told when you're ill, everybody says drink lots of vitamin C or have that. It's too late.

(02:36.462)
So the science says if your body's full of vitamin C before you get ill, there is actually a demonstrable reduction in the symptoms. It doesn't stop you getting ill, but it does actually improve the experience of being ill. And so you build that up and you get it going as a daily routine and then it makes you feel better. So that's what it is. So I read up on that and I went, I should probably try that. And actually I think it's made a reasonable impact. So when I do get ill, it's a lot less. Did it make any of your appendages go orange? Not yet. However, we can hold out.

I don't know. Just to check. Just to check. Well, you know, if it happens to me, you're not far behind me. there you go. Well, you can tip me off is what I'm thinking. A good few weeks ahead. Or maybe I won't. And then that'll be the, you know, you'd be like, is it happening? Yeah. Dave, has it gone orange yet? So are you a buyer, Es? What do you think about all that? Well, I think we're going to talk with Carlos also about marketing, right?

I think this is marketing. you don't say we've been marketed to, do Yes, absolutely. I've been secondhand marketed to, I think it's worse. well, so I would say, because there is obviously science behind the placebo effect as well, but if it is a placebo effect and I feel better in myself, surely that's a good thing anyway. That's like living in a simulation, it? Exactly right. So if I believe I'm better and I feel better about it, then maybe that's a good thing. Then by definition, you are better.

Exactly. My mind is in a healthy state. There go. Everything else flows with it. Yeah. There you go, Es. Whatever helps you sleep at night. Your negative Nelly approach to our health. I also use some of those supplements. But in the end, it's also about good night's sleep and exercise, et cetera. Eat healthy. Don't drink too much. Get a good night's sleep. Boring. Diaboredom.

Yeah, but you're really, think the companies are very happy with you just saying that and even also, you know, countering with placebo effects. Like you're like their client heaven. know I've just, I've just been sucked in, I'm sucked into the capitalist swirl, believing it all. But you even smile while saying that. you know, doesn't hurt. Happy is happy.

(04:48.238)
that has been drawn into that vortex. And secondary marketing too, Dave. So brought on another consumer into the ecosystem. So it's like a massive pyramid scheme. This is this is. Yes. And this is word of mouth that we're now doing as well. you're like... You've really spoiled this, Beers. I was going to be like, know, I thought it was going to be like, we don't feel good about ourselves. You'll go, yeah, I'm going to go get some of them. But no, you just, you just, you just, you've pulled back the curtain.

and unveiled us for the weak minded individuals. I'm so sorry. Very good that you do this. It's very good. Have you had one today? Thank you. I've just, I've just nearly choked myself on one. Why? We went down the wrong pipe. perfect. The irony being if you collapsed from there, the, the taking the health.

kick supplement. Can you imagine people telling that about you? Did you know how he, on his tombstone, was trying to be healthy? And it would have course be your fault Rob. It's always my fault. The situation would never have occurred if you hadn't have sold me on this snake oil. So hang on, we've gone from healthy futures and feeling better to I've sold you snake oil. Yeah, it has just turned me.

(06:07.802)
Anyway, let's get on to today's subject and we're going to talk about when is it valuable to measure and when actually are you just really making yourself feel better. So for me, what that really means is you can create a situation around whatever it is you're doing. It be at organization level, business unit level, team level, that you can create a series of metrics and those metrics might look really good.

like you might be green in everything. It might drive some superficial improvements in your team. It might make everybody feel good about themselves. But actually at the end of the day, if you stare really hard at it, is it actually driving new value? Or is it something that's like inconvenient to measure that actually would end up driving the value? And I've heard situations where people describe this as the watermelon effect.

which is green on the outside, you cut through the middle and everything feels red. That resonate with you, Es, have you seen that? No, yeah, I use the watermelons a lot, especially in teams and management that say, no, we want more velocity and we want more this. What you actually get is more watermelons, green on the outside, but red on the inside. So yeah, I use that a lot. If you focus on quantity only, and if that's your main focus, then yeah, you probably will get those numbers. But you know, what does it say about the quality?

Yeah. And I think for years, you know, marketing B2B or B2C is about customer centricity, value propositions, alignment with sales, obviously, you know, from lead conversion to opportunities to actually sold deals. But in practice, a lot of marketing still operates in campaigns, channels, lead volume, dashboarding. And I think that is, it's been going on for quite some years now, right?

But maybe we're now able to dive a little bit deeper. And also, to be honest, if you, as a company on sea level, you ask for those numbers, then those are the numbers you're going to get, right? The one that calls it out for me with exactly that is the Bezos story. He talks very publicly about it with the Amazon Contact Center. He was sat in a meeting and they tell him the Contact Center average answer time is really low and all this sort of stuff. He says it just doesn't feel right.

(08:34.805)
His perception was different. So in the middle of his board meeting type thing, he just dials the Amazon helpline and they all sit there in silence while he waits for the call to answer. Of course, inevitably the call takes 10 minutes to go through and then he says, thank you very much, hangs up, looks at his team and says, I don't know what you're measuring, but it's not the right answer. I think there's a lot of things go wrong with measurement. You measure the wrong thing. over-index on metrics that don't actually matter.

and you can get consumed by it and that's what creates the watermelon because people instinctively know if a service is good or bad and you might be saying it's all green because that's what was in the contract. go but nobody likes the service so what's wrong here versus the you might be measuring some things but people go I think it might be better than you think so you know and I think that's a big that's a big part of the people get just got obsessed with metrics and they're the wrong ones. How do we how do we end up in a place do you think that that kind of thing happens? I hear about it a lot.

in contracts, in the sense of you create a contract, you run for six months, your supplier comes in and goes, hey, good news everybody, fully green. And everyone goes, you know, doesn't, you know, the watermelon effect or it doesn't feel like that, very much the Bezos point. But it's not like the supplier trying to pull the wool over your eyes because those are the agreed SLA's or KPIs. How do we end up there? you think? It's the over rigidity.

in the process. People then revolve around it and they're not willing to change and adapt. When you look at a lot of contracts that get signed, there isn't a... They don't put in step back moments. Everybody's so pleased and glad that they got something sorted that they then sit back and then three, five years later you realise it's not what you wanted. I think we need to design better commercial structures that can adapt associated with what we're experiencing, what we're learning, what's changing in the market, what people like, what people don't like. And also I think we just need to get better at attaching

IT to business metrics. So did it improve waste in the supply chain? Did it improve overall experience quality at the end of the, you know, where the human sits, et cetera, rather than say that this was answered in that speed and X, Y, Z, and there was 5,000 of those less a month. because a lot of the time it just doesn't matter. They feel even when you set it out like that and you got onto some of those, you know, current day versions of how

(10:58.112)
say technology performance is measured, just as you were saying it, feels subordinate to the main point. know, being really, really good on an internal help desk for people to be able to get, I don't know, get their laptops, laptops fixed or something. That was really hard to say. Laptops fixed doesn't really feel like that. If you do a blindingly good job of that, whether you will have the correct sentiment feeling back from the customer organization, because it hasn't really moved

ball forward, has it? It might be a shorter wait on the help desk, but it's not improving your business performance. I think there are two sides on the coin of this, because on one side, I think it's about risk aversion and having the feeling that you're in control usually when you're signing up for that contract. It's like, so on what, you know, when are we going to say we're in control? And those are the measures that are being used in delivery as well. And on the other hand, if you're the delivering party, you do want to contribute to outcome in business.

But you're very aware of the low maturity of business owners on the client side or on the other side. So you're also risk averse like, if we put skin in the game, but we know that the product manager is not in the level that is really able to define features and products that will contribute to the business outcome, we're not going to sign up for it. I think it's maturity on both sides. of the reasons, just building on your point, one of the reasons it seems to me that

things like digital transformations in inverted commas or product-based transformations always get to the point where they have ended up costing probably more than agreed. But then everybody goes, well, it's not really delivering the value, it? And I think that comes from the same place where nobody really worked out what the really tough stuff was going to be in delivering the value and then incorporated that in the transformation. So for example,

You one of the ones that everybody goes on about in product organizations and DevOps and things is reduced time to market. I've rarely seen that very hard metric measured correctly. Have you, Robert? I see some people who get close to the understanding of how to measure it, but I think trying to pull all of that together is a very complex It's very systemic, isn't it? Everything that goes into that thing. And I think...

(13:21.72)
There are some who get the aspiration, but there are a few who manage to properly connect the dots end to end. And the other one is the sort of lagging versus leading and people getting good at measuring leading indicators as opposed to lagging. We all love a lagging indicator because it's easy to measure, but it's too late. Leading indicators are very complicated to work out and try and Not only that, they're complicated to work out and people have inherently less trust in them than what they've just seen happen.

even though what they've just seen happen might not be something that's going to help what happens next. if you, when we, when you think about it, I suppose marketing's an excellent example of this, isn't it? Where you put some marketing in, we measure something close to what we just did. You know, traditionally it was like clicks or how many reads or downloads, whatever. But actually what we want to know is what was the impact on the customer base and did it actually lead to more sales and conversion targets and revenue growth, et cetera? I think it's hard to do end to end.

because you have to put a huge amount of effort in, is like a quantum leap compared to measuring a click, which is too simple these days. We should be better than that. I think a lot of people confuse a KPI with a metric as well. That's even the basis. Like they use it as exactly the same thing, but it is different in how you should use it. Just say what the difference is for those who might not be aware. Yeah, the clicks that Rob just mentioned, that is typically a metric that you use, which is just...

You know, you're being observant of what is actually going on. It's an activity that you see, but a KPI, like the name says it, a key performance indicator is like a decision signal. Like we're successful if this percentage of pipeline has actually been converted. That's a KPI. That's different than a metrics, but in contracts, can, I see them being used interchangeably. even more complexity. What's an OKR?

An objective and key result. An objective is like a goal. we want to, like I'm working on one right now. So we want to have our people be ready for transformation. It's very open. And then a key indicator of that is that everyone has been doing training for X amount of time. So 80 % of our people have been trained and we've also had follow-up coaching sessions with them, for example.

(15:46.926)
That could be a KPI. Very helpful. So here's what we're saying. That yes, measure everything, but use the right things. So don't choose things that are either easy to measure or actually all they do is really blow smoke up the performance you're already doing versus some of the stuff that could be harder to measure and then harder to deliver on. I would...

classify it slightly differently, if you're managing an IT platform, huge amounts of observability is obviously very powerful. If something goes wrong, you've got all the information to hand. When you're thinking about judging performance and value, you measure what you need to be able to prove you've done what you needed to do to get to the KPI and the outcome that you're seeking. So we shouldn't confuse observability with the ability to measure success. They're very different things. if the system explodes at three o'clock in the morning,

having measured or observing everything that was going on is very useful for the engineer who needs to fix it, but it doesn't mean it's any use to the person trying to determine if we've been successful in the outcomes and value. So you need to have that different mindset. But people confuse and muddle it all up in one big fat ball. And because they've got lots of data, they think they've done a good job.

and then see, okay, what information are we missing? And then add another one and then see if it actually adds value instead of trying to put everything in one dashboard. And then you're like overwhelmed and you're like, I think we're doing good. you've just said the right word there, which is converting data to information. Just because you've got a pile of data doesn't mean it's any use. Now, I think I know that's an old adage, but it's still a very powerful one, which says, is it information or is it just data? Well, look, on that note, let's jump to our conversation with

Carlos Corredor, he's the founder and CEO of Condor and he is going to drive a perspective of this from what him and his organisation have been doing in the world of digital.

(17:54.414)
Carlos, how are you doing? Good to see you. Hi Dave, great to be here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Condor? Yeah, so we are a digital marketing agency for B2B and in particular IT services companies. I started eight years ago after working in a couple of other agencies. Yeah, heavily focused on business outcomes, right? More than a traditional advertising. I'm sure we'll get into that. But yeah, that's really the summary.

Cool. And digital marketing for those that are not close to the industry. How would you sort of sum it up? Leveraging the internet to get more clients and grow your business essentially. obviously that has the meaning of that has changed a lot in the last 30 years since the dot-com boom. But you know, with everything that that entailed back then and what that means today. And what would you say that just so people have got a mental image before we start to dive in, what are the sort of cut?

whole platforms and tools that you're using today? The pillars that we call it is really you have four things, right? That you, if you get right, you should be growing your business via digital marketing. You have the demand generation aspect, right? Where people get to know you, whether that's organically or not, or paid media, et cetera. But it's essentially letting people know that you exist. Then you have your website where eventually where people go. So everything that happens on the website, that's, think the second pillar.

The third one is the marketing automation side where especially for B2B you have a CRM, you need to be contacting them, you need to have that clean for the salespeople to do their job efficiently. that's the third. And really the fourth one, which is one that covers them all, is really the infrastructure. Are your analytics in place? Is your strategic planning? Are your goals logic? So I think...

You know, if you do those four, if you're doing those four things, you should be making an impact in your, in your revenue and your growth. What is it Carlos that attracted you to go into marketing? So that's actually, we talk about the analytical part and, you know, I'm sure we'll get into the details, but that's, that was really it. And in particular, it started with sports. I love playing sports and watching sports. And as a kid, I would read.

(20:15.19)
and memorize almost the back of baseball cards. And then that translated into fantasy baseball or World Cup brackets and eventually in college doing money ball type of analysis for pro baseball teams. And it's funny because my dad would say, he remembers all of the numbers, right? And it's not that I love the numbers or I love remembering things or I thought that was a mischaracterization, but it's more like, no, I use that to my advantage, right?

to beat the competition, right? And I saw, I've been working in marketing for more than 20 years, and I saw at the beginning that there was an opportunity to translate. didn't, I wasn't particularly passionate about marketing, to be honest, but I did see an opportunity with all of the data, especially in the digital world, to use that skill to my advantage in an era where there were not a lot of people, you know.

that we're looking at things that way. There's still a lot of traditional advertising and going with your gut, right? So that's really how I started. I'm websites for baseball back in the day with statistics and sports and life scores. And then it's like, okay, I like it. I like the availability of information and data to quickly improve. yeah, I'm from Venezuela, but I moved to Chicago for a master's in digital marketing when I started to...

who like it and that was 15 years ago. think baseball as well is a sport that is filled with statistics. It's incredible. think football's got a good amount of statistics, but you look at baseball, it's just miles and miles of data that can hit you through the feeds. They're always talking about some number out of somewhere about something that on a Tuesday they always hit it.

and they've hit seagulls three times on a Wednesday and all that sort of stuff. It's amazing how they track it all. I wonder if there's some in the early days, some person just writing absolutely everything down and then it's been remembered. I'm glad that you brought that statistic in particular because same as in marketing, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that being analytical is just using numbers. In baseball back in the day, used to be home runs.

(22:34.466)
for example, and batting average, I think now everybody knows that those are not the most important ones. And then that evolved into OPS or a couple others that are now spin efficiency and some really advanced ones. But to your point, right? Like you're not going to make any decision about your team or about your players because, you know, at night under 70 degrees, like is that really significant, right? Like, or is that just a random data point? Right. So I think a lot of that happens.

in marketing today where I don't think you will meet an agency that will tell you that they don't use data or that they're not data driven. All of them will tell you that, but then a lot of them are just using random numbers and random points without interpretation or true meaning or true predicting value. you know. So give us a sense then of what does good look like in terms of marketing analytics today? I think in general,

I guess I'll start by saying what bat looks like when they talk about, I'm not even going to say impressions or clicks because I think, you know, most agencies are beyond that. They understand that that's not accepted anymore and they will get in trouble if they report to a CMO or a CFO using clicks and impressions. But even if they're talking about conversions or marketing qualified leads, that's still not enough, right? Like home runs or batting hours, it used to be

clicks and impressions, right? Now, let's say on base percentage, which 15 years ago was advanced for its time, that's the equivalent of let's say conversions and marketing qualified leads. Today, that's not enough anymore. Right now, you at least have to be talking about opportunities and definitely close clients and revenue, right? So, you know, the good is, okay, you have to do, you have to start talking at top

bottom approach in terms of what's impacting your growth. So is it worth just setting out then, at least my mental model, I think of what you're saying is in most organizations at the sales and marketing front end, they have a funnel at the front and that funnel is where marketing effectively operates to try and engage with the market and then bring in a lot of conversations. Those conversations then turn into marketing qualified leads or MQLs.

(24:58.658)
which to your point, Carlos, is a little bit of spurious measure because you can easily generate a lot of MQLs, but then the next step is then how does that then qualify into being a sales opportunity, which then ultimately becomes a sale itself or a converted opportunity? Is that a broad version of a pipe that you would recognize? Yeah, no, totally. It's speaking in those terms, think marketers...

They're so used, because they live in Google Ads, then they use click through rates. They live in MailChimp, they use open rates, right? And then that's their comfort zone, right? But when they report that into the CFO or the C-suite, they don't even read that because they know it doesn't really matter. And also marketing has the bad habit of trying to defend themselves and prove their value as opposed to finding the truth. So I think those two things combined.

That's what made the C-suite not trust the marketing teams. And now we to kind of like regain that trust. So definitely that's where you have to start, just by speaking their language and using their metrics. Yeah. That traceability though, although you went through that four or five points Dave, tracking data consistently across something like that in the modern organization is still quite a challenge from know, fragmented data sets.

feeds, everything else, stop-start points in those flows. Cut, Gus, from your perspective, is there a big difference in the way organizations track it and there's a big gap? Some do it really well, some don't, or are they all roughly in the same place? Where do you see the sophistication of being able to create that data that says marketing did work? No, there's definitely a difference in maturity, right? Some, especially enterprise, right? The enterprise of the problems are a more advanced.

tend to get the basics more. The mid-market is where I see that they are really struggling. It's very rare to see an enterprise company that is not at least tracking, is not perfect, but they at least, they talk pipeline, right? They understand roughly the marketing contribution in pipeline terms, opportunities, clients, et cetera. Not perfect and definitely a lot of things to improve and to worry about, but mid-market.

(27:20.206)
I've seen companies, I would say most companies, they don't even have an understanding of how many new clients they close with marketing. And obviously it's blurred, right? Sometimes, you know, okay, they heard about you in a conference and then they've been having a relationship with a sales rep for the last three years. So it's like it was at marketing, it was at sales. So I understand that,

But it goes beyond that, right? Sometimes it was really a referral, it was a personal connection, but just because they put the name of your brand on Google and clicked it, then they assign it to marketing. That's not organic, that's not CEO, it wasn't your content, right? That was your personal connection. So there's a lot of that. And ultimately, they don't know if they're spending too much or too little in marketing. Should I spend another million? Should I actually remove money? It's very tough. then most mid-market companies,

have a really hard time even having a good guess of not even from the marketing channels and tactics, but at marketing as a whole, how much of it is contributing to pipeline and new clients. I think that many organizations talk about digital transformation, but they actually leave out the role of marketing in that entire end-to-end system. What tends to break if you

if you leave out the marketing part, or at least you leave it as you always did marketing? Well, it's also, it also depends right on the type of company you are and specifically how much are you depending on marketing for growth? I've had clients where they grow via acquisitions, right? So if that's the case, I understand that marketing is more of a support function of your website, of your positioning, right? And that part is more important. However, if marketing is expected to be an important

provider of new clients, then that's where you have to be really careful. And I think that the place to start is your CRM. Hotspot sales, you really need to be looking at that. Forget about the others to start with, right? Just look at your CRM, have your CRM clean in order and connected to other marketing platforms, but always use the CRM as a source of truth. mean, not only for marketing, obviously, also for the sales.

(29:40.302)
interactions that happen there because that's usually where salespeople are saying, okay, this is actually an opportunity, right? And, you know, this is actually the value of this opportunity. We closed it, we did not close it, right? So that's where I think they need to start. Just before we move fully off the point of analytics and the sort of needing to align to what your business thinks are real analytics versus sort of vanity analytics or vanity measures, if you like, marketing

as I understand it always used to have metrics like it takes seven touch points with any prospects for them to then take on the message. And then as you, as you articulated earlier that there is then potentially a loosely coupled relationship between that and then creating an opportunity which turns into a conversion in the world of analytics that we have today. And when you create the sort of alignment to analytics that the business are recognizing, are you feeling that

that marketing is able to therefore be more precise? Yes, if you are interpreting those touch points correctly. We just said that, for example, most companies don't even know, I mean market, but let's actually let's step up and let's talk about enterprise. Let's assume you're tracking the basics correctly and let's assume you're tracking the touch points, right? Which most companies are not there, but let's talk about the ones that are doing it, right? Then what I've seen where the struggle is,

that they don't recognize the touch points that are important. So for example, and I think again, we come back to misinterpreting the data, seven touch points. Okay, let's send you seven emails tomorrow. Dave does that every morning. He just says, I'm to seven emails out. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to get something. Just send seven emails to somebody and they'll do something. Highly productive.

So that doesn't mean you're going to close it, right? So those seven touch points, maybe you don't need seven. Maybe you need two very good ones, right? Maybe it's actually the quality of the, like you need to see which touch points are really responsible. And just because there's an email in every sequence, so there are a couple of ways to go about it and you can either get to, and here it's like when we're talking about.

(32:02.574)
a very mature marketing team that is tracking touch points and has enough data to understand the touch points. And I don't think now we're at a point of, you need to be really good at statistics. It's like, no, now you need to use common sense, right? And know the business and look at what's happening, right? You know, obviously it's not the same having your most expert consultant in a one hour meeting explaining the benefits of something as

a display remarketing impression. And I suppose you could have negative touch points as well that send you back. It's like snakes and ladders, isn't it? Where you go, why did you let Dave talk to them? the word touch point Do you know the big snake that took you all down the board? You thought you were going to win and then you end up at like number 12 from number 90. That's, know.

Sometimes analytics can be a bad thing when you can identify those sorts of things, Robert. So let's move on. What we've been talking about, perhaps without stating it, I think is largely B2B marketing or business to business. I think there are maybe two different types of marketing. So there's consumer-based marketing and then there's B2B. Do you just want to, before we move on any further, just like set out the differences in your mind as to what marketing in those two domains actually is? I mean, obviously it's a niche audience, right?

It's not the same, I always tell the example, especially of the newer people on my team or people that don't have that much experience in B2Bs, like you're not selling $10 iPhone cover, right? That with just one cool picture, know, people are gonna click and buy it, right? If you wanna sell a consulting project of $100,000, it's a completely different ballgame, right? So obviously you're talking about an audience that is very niche, so you cannot do mass media at all.

They are really hard to reach, they're really senior. A lot of times they're buying committees and not only they have buying committees, but every person in the committee has a different interest. And sometimes it's opposing between themselves or a different, what they call job to be done, right? And on top of that, what you're selling, again, it's not as easy as, this is the best iPhone cover and it will never destruct it and I'll throw it from the 10th floor and it doesn't break. No, it's a really complex, high consideration.

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Offerings and obviously this and also the sales cycles are really long, right? So that's really what makes B2B different and I think the other layer of complexity that a lot of times is underrated is that most of the so-called best practices that are out there are either for enterprise or for Entrepreneurs, right? Or when you bring on a marketer, they have either enterprise experience

or SMB experience, mostly enterprise experience. So if you're in mid market, then they're applying a way of playing the game that you won't work for where you are. So I think those are things that you need to watch out for. And it's worth saying that mid market is an absolutely enormous category, isn't it? And I think the Gartner definition of mid market is somewhere around 500 million to about 5 billion revenue organizations. Is that the designation you hold, Carlos, when you make that description?

Yeah, I started a little bit smaller for me. If you're already at 50 million or let's say at least a hundred million, I started to consider mid-marker or close enough to mid-market that you want to compete with mid-market. But on that, yeah, I agree. Yeah. So these can be very large, substantial, complex organizations in their own right. So what's your speculation that they have, why haven't they able to implement

some of the best practices that you're talking about in terms of understanding pipeline, maybe some of the analytics platforms, that kind of thing.

I mean, think, well, for one, digital marketing is still relatively new. Again, 20, 30 years, I'd say, but also has evolved very quickly. And not only, you even the role of marketing, right? Like a lot of times in these organizations, the expectation is, okay, you do some design collateral. actually you're in charge of the new website, right? But, you know, I think now,

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they are again, most of the time, most companies, now they're saying, okay, now you're responsible to bring me new clients. That's your main role. But that's relatively new. the other thing is that there's usually a small team, right? So that's a challenge also in marketing, especially in the US, there's a lot of, it's a high turnover industry. So maybe you have a team of three, but they all started a year and a half ago, right? So that's another challenge that you face. So, you know, I don't think that you,

You necessarily have to say, you know, we've been in business 20 years. are a hundred million or a $500 million company. We should be doing better. It's not necessarily like that because even though marketing has existed for 20 years, its role has evolved a lot and so has the skills that are required and these couple of other challenges that I mentioned. So I think all of that makes it difficult. And I don't think people should feel necessarily bad about where they are today, as long as they acknowledge all of these challenges and they have a plan.

Moving on a little bit now from marketing operations and the analytics side of things into the remainder of the discipline of what you guys are doing and basically how AI is going to impact that. So the unexpected aspects of AI and gen AI over the last few years has been its ability to sort of impinge on the creative side of what we do. So what are you seeing at the moment in terms of impact there and what do you think that's going to look like over the next, I don't know, two or three years?

If you, you dare speculate that far out. Yeah, no, there's, there's a couple of things that I would point. The first one is that obviously now anybody or is a lot of content being created. So, you know, where before you would have to spend a good amount of money paying a person or a freelancer to write content. Now anyone is writing content. You have to take it a step beyond that. you have to compete on quality and not on quantity. Number one, right?

You have to do original research. You have to change, you know, have a mindset change. It's not how it was 15 years ago, even five years ago, that just publishing a bunch of SEO posts with educational content, your business could thrive based on that. That's not the case anymore. You need to have, again, original research, your own data, or at least data that no one else has access to.

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Right. So that's, think, also go beyond text, right? Still AI can do a lot of text. AI cannot have the founder of a company or the thought leaders of the company putting out videos, right? With valuable messaging. So that's one thing, right? So, and then the other one is that I think I've seen happen a lot. It's like now all of the marketers, because they use AI, that all marketers think that they are

copywriters or content producers. And I think that's really, really dangerous. think that leveraging or using either ChagyBT or whatever you're using to create, you know, email subjects or even the content of your homepage, right? And what you're saying, that's really, that's your voice, right? So if you are leaving that in the hands of AI or in the hands of a marketer that doesn't have experience in your industry or experience with copywriting,

And product marketing, that's also really, really dangerous. So I would highlight those two. So do you think in marketing terms and in impact terms, high volumes of AI generated content, there's going to be a differentiator for those that are creating sort of more thoughtful content? Or do you think it's just purely the editorial of AI generated content? Do you get my drift there?

Yeah, no, think it's both. mean, because for example, you could have editorial content and really more original first party, right? I think that's, that's just the thing is right. So one of the misconceptions people think that Chagy Pt and perplexity and Gemini, the traffic from Google is going to be replaced from traffic from those. And that's, that's not the case. The traffic will be much smaller just because the answers are being found in the engines themselves. However, the final traffic that will come out.

It's going be people that are much readier to buy, right? But how do you get that, that traffic you with the top, you know, educational questions are going to be answered by the LLM. Right. If you ask, for example, if you ask Chagy Pt, what is private cloud versus public cloud, they're not going to send you to you to a company, right? They're going to answer right then and there, and they're not going to provide. Now, if you continue to ask, but how about.

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you know, why has average changed in the last year in the US for this industry, right? And maybe they will start then mentioning either publishers or experts for that particular industry, for a particular offering within private cloud. So the more niche and specific you are, and if you have your own data, right? Let's say if you publish a report where you talk to the CIOs from Fortune 1000 companies,

Then, know, maybe chat GPT will mention that you are the thought leader there or we'll see you as a thought leader. that's, that's, I get it. It's both, right? You need to be more agile, but then you need to also be focused on, on answers that chat GPT won't answer by themselves and where they will lean on experts on the field. mentioned the difference there between somebody who's been using chat GPT or something similar.

to get a certain amount of first base information. So therefore when they're coming through to a company, they're going to be giving, you know, going to be more ready to buy from that company because they've already perhaps self-educated or use those tools for research. How does that change inbound marketing? Like how do you think about that? And, and you know, what do you, what do you do differently? Yeah. So another misconception is that they think that markers have to, they think that

positioning your content to be found by Chagypti or Gemini or AI or LLMs, it has the same or similar old tricks as what SEO used to have, right? It was very technical. It's like meta tags and crawlers and keyword insertion. I mean, SEO has changed, but let's say they're still somewhat technical, right? But what initial research has shown from LLMs is that it's a little bit

Like going back to basics, right? It's like the more you're present in different outlets that are respected within that industry, then the more likely is that Shadjibiti is going to mention you, right? What does that mean? Well, you need to be on other podcasts, right? That are well respected. You need to do PR.

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you know, as it was done either back in the day or now the equivalent of digital PR, right? You need to be mentioned by other folks, right? You need to do, you need to go back to the basis of marketing and PR and branding, you know, for Chagy Bt to recognize you. You can have a great website with hundreds of blog posts or content pieces, but that's, that's not enough, right? You need to be out there as well outside of, of, of your own assets.

Yeah, because I suppose it's the statistical nature of the way LLMs work. But if you can be in as many places and those places are well received and trained on, then you're going to pop up, aren't you? Because it is just a numbers game associated with the next word that's going to pop out, which hopefully is your company. So I suppose you have to think differently about optimization for making sure that you're the answer that pops out, the LLM.

over your competitors. So I suppose that completely changed the mindset around where you put yourself out there. So being more public and talking on all those platforms then is a massive advantage now, suddenly, I suppose you're saying, aren't you? But the question is, is the intent still there? Like, is it authentic? It's the same with social media, etc. But also with AI, obviously, if we're talking about B2B, it's relationship building, right? All those years and all those people, the people you get in touch with with the other companies.

What do you see happening there when it's about authentic intents that you want to get across when you're trying to build connections? Yeah, agree. Yeah, it needs to be authentic. Ultimately, in B2B, it's a lot of relationship building. But I think also you have to start those relationships somewhere. And I think this is another challenge. And as of now, we've talked about using the right metrics. You want to use close clients, for example. You don't want to use an impression. However,

I'm also an advocate of doing awareness and doing branding efforts, but measuring them in the right way. And I think this is where ABM comes in and then where it's becoming really important. think if you can, for example, video views, video views by themselves, if you put it just on programmatic towards anyone who's been, I don't know, whoever is between 20 and 50 and lives in the United States, that's

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you're going to waste that money if you're in B2B, most likely. However, if you have an each audience and you're getting into the CIOs of Enterprise 1000s, and that's the ones that you're selling to, right? And if your video, where you talk about a very hot problem in the industry and your recommendation on how to solve it, if your video is watched by 20 of those CIOs, right? And if they watch 75 % of that video.

I'd be willing to pay a good amount of money for that, right? And that's, you're not gonna see it in a close client yet, but you know, that's something that if you're looking at correctly, that's a great signal, right? It's something that again, is one of those touch points that is much more valuable than sending an email that somebody opens and doesn't do anything and it's not even, you know, a part of a buying committee. Those are ways that you have maneuver like that so you don't end up wasting a bunch of your budget, you know.

Trying to awareness or putting it all on bottom funnel, right? Those are things that you take into account and again, you know, not only analytics, which sells a little bit of common sense and you know, when looking at the whole picture.

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And we end every episode of the show by asking our guests what they're excited about doing next. And that could be they've got something really good coming up this weekend, or it could be something in their professional life. So Carlos, what are you excited about doing next? Well, this is the year of the World Cup, maybe not next week, but in a couple of months. So I'm excited about that. Have the preparations started over there? Yeah, there's some games that they had to kind of like test all the

production and planning and interest for tickets and let's say price sensitivity. yeah, there was quite a bit of press about the price of some of tickets. But there's going to be a couple of good matches here in Miami and even though Venezuela didn't make it, is always in my team, I'm excited to see what games I can catch. But that's in the summer. And then going back also to the marketing world, to what we do, I think I'm particularly excited about evolving our analytical.

platform we call it Wings, Wings Marketing Analytics, and there's some exciting features coming there. I think with first party attribution, that's an area that we didn't talk much, but you know, with privacy settings and everything, know, the data, you know, that companies, was, it was tougher companies to track the data a year or two ago. Now it's even tougher, right? So now it's not on the problem is not only interpreting it, but actually having the data to interpret it. Right. so including or replacing third party data and platform data with first party.

That's something that's in our role map and in general, right? We're a marketing agent, but we're putting my efforts into also, you know, having a product that is a source of truth for our clients. So I'm excited really about, you know, building that role that's going to be our big focus this year is that. And then the World Cup. let's see what else, you know, nowadays, know, with AI. AI is a huge one, you know.

I'm anxious, excited and optimistic and careful. Everything at once about AI. You need to, I think, be putting good brains and time into doing AI, but doing it smartly and not for the sake of doing it. So that's another area. On your platform, you mentioned that you're building in more specificity and impact around the analytics and stuff.

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Are you working on, the conversation there, you were talking about trying to push marketing down the funnel to basically create a series of analytics and impact as a result of getting right down to opportunity. So is that what your platform's supporting, that sort of deeper into the funnel aspect of marketing? Right, yeah. It's that a little bit of a mind shift where usually marketers, they want to show everything deterministically and

By that, mean that exactly the clicks align one with the other. Whereas I'm more concerned of what is our consensus as a team, meaning from my clients, when the CMO and the CFO and the head of sales, who do they think

what's responsible for bringing this client, right? And maybe it was, let's give half to marketing, half to sales. If that's a consensus, then that's what I want my platform to reflect on, right? Now you can evolve that, right? And maybe it's not half and half and maybe you can use better data, but that's where I want to start. I want to start at that level, making sure the C-suite, the C-suite trust what they see. Because as you mentioned, Dave, it's very common that if the marketing is the one that sends the report, says, that's not true.

those type, I those guys and forget. then the CFO is like, don't even send me a report because I cannot make any decision because nobody's trusting it. I think, I think that trust is a, is a key part because that, that, that type of data where you're doing attribution of success can get quite emotional in an organization as well. So we, we have to trust it and you don't want people who are disagreeing with it because that, obviously can drive all sorts of incentivization with inside organizations as well. But more importantly, I need to ask since your team,

didn't make it to the World Cup, who will you be cheering for? Who are you actually, you what's your number two team from a football perspective that you're going to be, you know, That is literally like you read my mind, Robert. That is literally like you read my Well, actually more similar than you might think, Dave. Scary. May or may not stress you out, but anyway. Well, know, I, sentimentally, I, I'm in the US now. I want the US to...

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And now they're hosting the World Cup also, right? So I like the US too well, but obviously, you know, they're not, I don't think quite ready to win it. So if we are talking about who would I like to realistically win the World Cup, then I have to go with Brazil. You know, my dad was a fan of Pelé and that some people say is best team in the history in the seventies. And he transmitted that to me. And I've been to Brazil a couple of times and I felt how

culturally ingrained football or soccer is part and I was in the last World Cup in Brazil. So I'm a fan of that. So, you know, I would say those two. They've got the five stars over the top of the, is it five? They've got five years. Germany's got four, haven't they? And Brazil have got five. So good stuff. Who you going to support Robert? Well, obviously David, it will be England.

I'll be a long-suffering, I am a very long-suffering England supporter where on paper we've got this amazing team and we turn up and go, shall we, you know, just knock it around like you your own football. But there was hope. The thing about football is, especially for England, there's always loads of hope and then it's crushing when it doesn't work.

the Euro. mean, actually, to be fair, the England female team has done extremely well. Amazingly well. The coach, you... from which country is she? I'm not saying it might be associated with yours, but she's done an outstanding job. It's also worth saying that one of the main players from the English football team won Strictly Come Dancing last year.

I mean, is basic after success. Anyway, Carlos, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing a bit of your world with us. No, thank you guys. This has been great. Really appreciate it. If you'd like to discuss any of the issues on this week's show and how they might impact you and your business, please get in touch with us at realitiesremix.capgemini.com. We're all on LinkedIn, so we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to connect and DM if you have any questions for the show to tackle. And of course, please rate and subscribe to our podcast. It really helps us improve the show.

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A huge thanks to Carlos, our sound and editing wizards Ben and Louis, our producer Marcel and of course to all our listeners. See you in another reality next week.