Talk Commerce

In this episode Live from Shoptalk, host Isaac Morey sits down with Ken Chestnut, the Global Head of Partner Ecosystem at Intuit, live from the floor of Shoptalk in Las Vegas. If you have ever wondered how industry leaders like Intuit—the powerhouse behind QuickBooks and Mailchimp—are bridging the gap between financial operations and marketing growth, this episode provides a front-row seat. They discuss the realities of the modern Martech stack, the strategic implementation of artificial intelligence, and why retention is the new frontier for small business success.
Key Takeaways
  • Retention Over Acquisition: Ken emphasizes that "retention is the new acquisition." While top-of-funnel marketing is important, businesses achieve higher ROI by focusing on loyalty and servicing existing customers effectively.
  • AI as a Means, Not an End: Rather than viewing AI as a content-generation tool, Intuit uses it for predictive analytics and personalization at scale, helping business owners "punch above their weight class" without needing massive marketing departments.
  • The Power of Integration: A significant hurdle for small businesses is data silos. By integrating platforms like Shopify with QuickBooks and Mailchimp, businesses can move away from "data hoarding" and toward actionable insights.
  • The Rise of Agentic Commerce: Ken shares a forward-looking perspective on "agentic-to-agentic" purchasing, where AI agents handle transactions. He notes that the next great challenge for brands will be ensuring their identity and personalization strategies remain relevant when a bot—not a human—is making the buying decision.
The conversation opens with a focus on the core mission of Intuit: providing an end-to-end platform for small businesses. Ken explains that while QuickBooks handles the "run" side of business, Mailchimp powers the "grow" side. He highlights a critical shift in marketing strategy, noting, "The ROI on owned channels, whether it's email or SMS, is significantly higher than paid media, often reaching up to 40x ROI."
As the discussion progresses, Isaac and Ken address the common struggle of data silos. Many businesses use between 6 and 20 different technologies, creating a fragmented view of their customers. Ken explains how Intuit leverages AI to unify this data, specifically citing the February integration with Shopify as a prime example. "Our top 10% of joint merchants are seeing on average a 30x ROI because of that deep end-to-end solution," Ken notes, emphasizing the impact of combined roadmaps and joint innovation.
Finally, the discussion turns to the future. Ken shares his "hot take" on the shift toward agentic purchasing. He challenges listeners to think about how their brand will maintain its value when automated agents prioritize price and specifications over brand loyalty. The episode concludes with a look at Intuit’s move into the mid-market space, ensuring that as their smallest customers succeed and scale, the Intuit ecosystem scales right along with them.
Final Thoughts:
This episode serves as a reminder that the most successful businesses are those that minimize friction and maximize intelligence. By integrating financial data with marketing efforts, merchants can turn their numbers into narratives that drive genuine loyalty. As the industry moves toward AI-driven decision-making, the ability to build an effective ecosystem will be the best strategy of the modern commerce era.


Chapters

00:00 - Introduction to the episode and setting the scene at Shoptalk
01:45 - The role of ecosystem management in modern commerce
03:30 - Distinguishing between bolt-on tools and foundational platform architecture
06:15 - Criteria for selecting high-value partners
08:45 - Maintaining platform consistency while fostering third-party innovation
12:20 - Closing thoughts on the future of ecosystem growth


About Our Guest

Ken Chestnut is the Global Head of Partner Ecosystem for @Intuit Mailchimp. With an extensive background in defining and scaling technology alliances at companies like AWS and Stripe, Ken specializes in category definition and go-to-market strategies. He is focused on building ecosystems where both technology and service partners contribute meaningfully to the success of small and mid-sized businesses globally.

This has been produced in cooperation with Content Cucumber
https://www.contentcucumber.com/


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What is Talk Commerce?

If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.

Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.

Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.

You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com

[00:00.0]
I'm Isaac Mori. Welcome to a special episode of Talk Commerce, filmed live at Shop Talk Las Vegas, where I sat down with Ken Chestnut of Intuit. That's the company that operates both Mailchimp and QuickBooks. Let's dive right in. My name is Ken Chestnut.

[00:17.1]
I lead our partner business across our small business group at Intuit which includes both QuickBooks as well as Mailchimp. Great. And what are some of the most exciting uses that small businesses have for Intuit and for mailchimp? Yeah, so the number one challenge for small businesses is growing their business.

[00:35.0]
How do they get new customers? So with small business group across Mailchimp and QuickBooks, our vision is to provide an end to end platform for small and mid sized businesses to run and grow their business. So run their business with QuickBooks, grow their business with Mailchimp.

[00:52.4]
So really providing that end to end platform to enable small businesses to run and grow their business and to address their core, core challenges which is to get new customers grow their business. Yeah, great. I think growth, you know, I'm in marketing so growth is kind of the most exciting area for me. For a small business who you know, they know they should be doing email marketing, they've heard about mailchimp, but maybe they haven't started yet.

[01:13.1]
What would you say to them if they're exploring and they came across this video? Yeah, a couple of things there. One is you know, think about the end goals, what the objective is and working backwards from there in terms of what are your key challenges and what are the solutions that can help you achieve that.

[01:34.6]
So as an example, just to double click on that, a lot of companies start out with paid media, buying ads on various ad platforms. And the ROI on those are actually quite, quite small because the cost of acquisition is increasing.

[01:54.3]
And it turns out owned channels, whether it's email or SMS are actually higher ROI. So our customers typically see 40 X ROI on own channels, email and SMS.

[02:11.0]
And then I would say the other. So think about sort of, you know, your audience, your ideal customer profile, what is the best channel to reach them. And then I would say the other thing is there's a lot of focus on sort of top of funnel, how do you get new customers when in fact it's cheaper to service an existing customer than it is to acquire new customers.

[02:35.9]
So what does that end to end life cycle look like? Not just sort of top of funnel acquisition of new customers, but how do you retain and create loyalty with your existing customers as well? Yeah, so thinking about sort of a lot of those strategies.

[02:52.3]
Yeah, great. Let's talk a little bit and dive into a little bit more about like let's say I have some customers They've come to my brick and mortar or they purchased online through E commerce. I have their emails. What do I do to keep them engaged and keep getting, you know, keep that relationship going.

[03:07.5]
Yeah, so it's really thinking about a relationship, so understanding your audience, understanding your customers and understanding their journey and what, what is sort of content, what are things that are top of mind for them to keep them engaged?

[03:25.2]
I would say another area. And then having those user journeys. So a lot of what our customers do is they leverage our AI capabilities, automation to have predefined journeys for their customers, and then also segmenting your customers.

[03:46.6]
So this is where once again we're leveraging AI to help our customers better understand their customers. Not every customer is treated equally. There may be some that are higher. Your VIP customers and the experience that you want to have with them is maybe a little bit different than a one time customer.

[04:05.1]
So I would say understanding your segments, understanding your different customer profiles and then having content, having an experience that is tailored to the needs or how those customers want to engage with you.

[04:20.6]
Yeah, great advice. Okay, well I wouldn't be doing my job as an interviewer if I didn't ask you about AI. How does artificial intelligence play in? What kinds of AI features do you guys offer and what do you recommend? Someone who's feeling a little overwhelmed by it, like how should they get started?

[04:36.7]
Yeah, I would say, you know, we view AI as sort of a means to an end and not the end itself. So where we see opportunity with AI and where we're deeply embedding AI in the mailchimp platform is to your point. Not everyone is a marketing expert.

[04:55.9]
They may be running a small business, they may be a business owner and don't have marketing expertise, them or marketing folks on staff. So how can we leverage AI to have those business owners and operators punch above their weight class in terms of doing effective marketing?

[05:18.3]
And it's not just around sort of content. You hear a lot of feedback these days around sort of slop around AI generated content. But it's really getting deeper around that, around predictive analytics and being able to do personalization at scale.

[05:35.8]
So an example there is we had a February launch of mailchimp where we more deeply integrated our solution with Shopify. So whereas before you would just bring in your Shopify data to mailchimp or vice versa, we're really providing value to the customers.

[05:54.3]
There in terms of connecting to your Shopify store immediately, having recommended automations, segmenting those automatically segmenting those customers into your VR, IP or most loyal customers surfacing where there's potential market opportunity, where is there potential churn.

[06:12.6]
So really deeply embedding AI in terms of not just content generation but predictive analytics and where you can help businesses grow in terms of better understanding their customers, understanding which campaigns they should be running, understanding which are their most valuable customers for them to engage.

[06:33.2]
That's really where the power of AI comes into play and we're deeply integrating and embedd into our platform. Very cool. Yeah, okay, so we've talked about the growth side of things. Now let's talk about the operations side and what else does Intuit have to offer? Yeah, I mean we have a number of different capabilities both within Mailchimp as well as within QuickBooks.

[06:55.8]
I would say you know the key theme is retention is the new acquisition. So really once again providing that end to end platform, understanding your finances, your your cost of acquisitions so that you can create marketing campaigns based upon that financial data, to run the most effective campaigns across different channels but whether it be owned or paid channels, so optimizing the channels that you engage with your customers, based upon the marketing campaigns that have been most effective in the past as well as customer data that may be in QuickBooks.

[07:39.5]
So providing that 360 degree view, so that you can run the most effective campaigns and increase your retention of customers as well. Yeah, that's a great point. The two are really interconnected. Absolutely. Finances and obviously acquiring new customers 100%. Okay, for someone who's maybe just getting started in the ecosystem, what other aspects or features might you want to highlight?

[08:00.9]
And really? Yeah, I mean I would say the other challenge that customers have, which you know my role in partnerships comes into play is you know, challenges around different silos.

[08:17.2]
So they may be maybe using Meta for ads or TikTok or what have you. They may have email, they may have customer data in spreadsheets. It's all disparate. So typically what we see is our customers may use 6uh to 7 different technologies in their Martech stack, some of them as more than 20 different solutions in their Martech stack.

[08:43.1]
And really we see opportunity to make it seamless for customers to be able to use those different tools or solutions seamlessly. End to End to drive outcomes. So a lot of my work is working with partners like Shopify and others so that we provide a seamless end to end solution for customers.

[09:05.7]
So I think a lot of focus is on hey, I need to spend ads on meta or do this without necessarily thinking about how do I provide a multi channel experience for my customers via sms, via email, via paid channels.

[09:24.7]
And then given the focus on AI, a lot of data hoarding. So hoarding data, storing it, but not really necessarily knowing how to action it. And really once again that's where the power of AI comes into play is providing leveraging AI to surface those insights and surface those recommendations as opposed to just simply hoarding the data and not being able to take action on it.

[09:52.5]
Yeah, absolutely. I know as a small business owner myself I definitely have data and different silos that I can't always leverage in a uniform way. 100%. As far as partnerships, are there any that you're especially excited about or that you want to highlight and share here? Yeah, I'm super excited about our partnership with Shopify.

[10:10.2]
They're here at Shop Talk as well. We're deepening the partnership there across both Mailchimp and QuickBooks to provide that insight and to help merchants grow their business. What we see with our latest release in February is our, our top 10% of joint customers, Joint merchants with Shopify.

[10:33.2]
They're seeing on average a 30x ROI on their investment because of that deep end to end solution both from a go to market standpoint and joint roadmap and joint innovation to surface up those insights and actions to help them grow their Shopify store.

[10:52.8]
So super excited about our Shopify partnership. Yeah, cool. Want to talk a little bit about our, you know we're here at Shop Talk Las Vegas and these are important events that bring together a whole lot of players in the industry. Want to talk a little bit about that experience here and kind of what it's meant for you and for Intuit.

[11:09.7]
Yeah, I love coming to Shop Talk. I love meeting peers. I love you know, just walking the convention hall floor, seeing who's here, catching up with old colleagues, meeting new colleagues, knowing what's top of mind, for merchants.

[11:30.1]
It's just a lot of energy and a lot of opportunity to sort of connect with people across the ecosystem whether it be partners, existing customers, prospective customers. It's always great to sort of see what's going on in the industry. So it's a great opportunity there.

[11:46.2]
Cool. And what's next for Intuit? Any anything that people should be keeping an eye out for in the next year or so? I would say, you know, continuing to double down on AI and our investments there once again, as a means to an outcome, so to drive outcomes for our customers.

[12:03.3]
And then I would say historically folks have thought of Intuit for small businesses. We have a, thousands and thousands of customers that want us to grow Intuit to grow with them as they grow their business.

[12:21.6]
So you will see us continuing to push up mid market, to address the needs of our mid market customers, both Mailchimp and QuickBooks that have grown with us historically but want to stay on the Intuit platform. So that's a lot of our focus going forward.

[12:37.5]
It makes a lot of sense because. Because if you're serving small businesses for many, many years, eventually some of those small businesses are gonna grow 100%. 100%. Cool. Well, one of the last questions we like to close out on is always if you have any hot takes to share any hot takes, I would say there's a lot of focus on agentic to agentic experiences.

[13:03.8]
Agents buying on behalf of. I think there's a lot of opportunity and where I'm super excited about is how do brands play in the mix with the agentic to agentic purchasing experience. So if you're purchasing paper, an agent is going to look for a paper at a specific spec, that meets the right pricing criteria.

[13:28.6]
But I think where the opportunity and where I'm excited about is how do you surface your brand to the agentic experience. Because if I'm buying you a gift then I want to be able to know what you care about personalization of the gift.

[13:46.1]
And I think that's where I'm super excited about as you think about these agentic to agentic experiences, how do you surface the brand and personalize that with who you're buying for to provide sort of that more tailored experience as opposed to buying based upon price or availability or what have you?

[14:06.0]
I think that's a ripe area of opportunity, and innovation that I'm very excited about. Yeah, very cool. Yeah. Anything else that you'd like to talk about or share with our audience while we're here? No, I'm just very excited.

[14:21.2]
Appreciate the opportunity and the time here and looking forward to continuing the conversation and being here for the rest of the conference. Very cool. I appreciate your time, Ken. It's been a great conversation. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Take care.