Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar on How I Manage Personalization. I'm Cat. I'm a Marketing Director here at Salesforce, and I primarily work with our customer acquisition team and small business. I've been working with start-ups and scale-ups for most of my career, and I'm pretty excited to be talking today with Ben Willis about how he manages personalization as a small business. Now before I get started, I do just want to cover off a little bit of housekeeping. So your screen is completely customizable. And so you can make the deck or our heads, bigger or smaller at any time as it suits you. There are also some assets that you can see on your scene that you're going to be able to download, and they'll be talking a bit more to some of the topics that we're going to be going through today. The webinar will also be recorded. So -- and it will be sent to the e-mail that you registered with shortly after the webinar ends. So there are colleagues that you think would find this useful or if there's something you want to come back to, you will have it as a reference. And finally, this is a live webinar. [Operator Instructions] And we'll answer all of your questions or as many as we can at the end of the webinar. I do also just wanted to acknowledge before I bring in today's guest that it is Night Out week and that I am coming to you from Sydney, which is Gadigal land, and acknowledge the traditional owners of the land. This land was and always will be aboriginal land, and they have a continued connection to the land, water and culture. Now I want to acknowledge any leaders and investors past, present and emerging that might be with us and around us today. So today, we're going to take you through personalization and why that's important, how to build out your personas, how to create your single source of truth to do that and how to automate scale, test and learn. Now as a marketer that works with the technology product, I love talking about this stuff, but I know you just don't want to hear from me. So I'd like to bring in my guest today, Ben Willis, who is the CTO at the Aussie start-up, MadeComfy. Ben, welcome.

Hey, Cat. Thank you For having me.

Thanks for being with us. So do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and a bit about MadeComfy before we get started?

Yes, sure. So obviously, CTO here at MadeComfy. I'm responsible for engineering product and systems at Salesforce and marketing platforms as well there here at MadeComfy. MadeComfy is a short-term rental management company, so we specialize in all around Australia, in basically looking after short-term rentals for things like Booking.com, Airbnb on that market. We look at everything from individual owners all the way up to big commercial developments that are on the short-term rental market. The company has been around for 6, 7 years at that sort of level of the past 2 years. And yes, I've been here for the past 2 years and really working on sort of just the next evolution of the technology at MadeComfy.

So it sounds like you've got quite a few different types of people that you're talking to from MadeComfy, both from a B2C and a B2B place. So why is personalization important for your business?

Yes. So really -- that's right. We actually have a lot of customers being a service business, but also a technology business. We sort of see ourselves as being both of those things. But I'm sure anyone out there who's worked in the service business before knows that you have a lot of moving components but customers as well. So we have, obviously, our owners of our properties. They're our core sort of customer base, but every guest that stays in a property for us is part of that as well. You then have our corporate partners. You book with us. We have our real estate agents who we help facilitate in the short-term rental market. And then we also have our contractors who are essentially customers as well. We've got cleaning services all over Australia, where we have to actually work in a B2B environment there as well. So it's really important for us. I mean that's the big thing for us, obviously, being across so many customers. It's not an easy thing to handle if you don't sort of have those ideas and personas, but then there's ideas of automaking to help with those personas as well. And that is -- there's obviously something there that is very different depending on the persona too. We could have that situation where if we are dealing with a guest, that's a very, very high touch, very quick interactions that go back and forth, "Where my keys today? We're checking out today. Can I help with this?" That's a very different interaction that we have with a sales process with an owner, which then again is different if you have an individual owner who may have 1 property. There are very different personas for someone with 200 properties. Just an individual owner who may have one property, they are very different personas to someone with 200 compared with one property is very-- they would like to hear from us all the time. They want to know how the property is going. They want human interaction where they're on the phone. They want to have to chat with us very quickly as opposed to someone with 200 properties. They want us to manage that portfolio and they want reports. So they want analytics. They want reports. They want forecasting. They are very, very different things. So that's kind of -- the key benefits for us is actually having an understanding of those things because we really wouldn't have been able to get anywhere without going through that as well. And then one of the personas that's there, too, as part of it, obviously, is a very large -- sorry, it is businesses like say, corporate partners are really important as well. You're then getting into the territory of needing to have personas within a very large business that we have to then talk to and deliver to as well. So that personalization really comes into it, where we just need to understand those people, but we need to understand how we personalize how we'll talk to you, how we deliver our e-mails to you. What a chat would look like. What a phone call would look like. So it's technology, it's automation, but it's all the way through to how we react with people as well.

Yes. Awesome. So are you saying like in your business, there's so many different people that you're dealing with. They want different things from you. How do we deliver that really quickly to help us grow the business, increase our staff productivity and really make sure that we're #1, like what we're doing? So I know that you had -- sorry.

No, no, no, my fault. You go.

No. I was going to say, I know that when you started like a lot of small businesses, you saw this as being human touch, but you've now built out on technology. When was the right time for you to start to build out, firstly, those personas where it's like, okay, we're not just talking to everyone anymore? And then where does the technology come in?

Yes. So look, the personas early days, there was very limited idea of personas in the business. Obviously, it kind of existed before I started over the past 2 years, but I have spent that time building out the product function further or as an actual function within the business properly. But the early days of personas we're really just having maybe 3 different personas for owners. And that's really all it was. So it's just like we have 3 personas to owners. You've got sort of low touch, medium touch, high touch, and that's really all we were sort of talking about in those days there. Then as I've sort of brought on and set up the product function into the business, we then needed to work on those personas and actually create broader personas across each of those customers because we're not just building technology for owners. We're building technology for every person we interact with in the different roles in the different personas and all those sort of things. So without those sort of that product function, we wouldn't have really been able to do that. And really, those personas in the early days were just sales personas. It was how do I talk to you on the phone was the only reason they really existed. So that was something that was more of how do we tailor the sales conversation to you, not the entire customer journey of all our different customers and personas and all those sort of things. In those early days as well, the technology was nowhere near as advanced as we are now. We've sort of been on a very large journey in the past 2 years of really trying to set up the technology stack, especially from a CRM and a system point of view, where we can actually do those sort of things. And we have to understand the customer there in order to do it, right? There was no point going on this 2-year journey of building technology stack as well if we didn't have the ability to actually implement the personas -- or the automations and the journeys and all those things we want to do as well.

So let's talk about that critical mass. Where was it? When did you reach it? And why did you bring the technology in?

Yes. So one of the big parts of sort of getting there was -- the way that sort of worked through the owners, this is just as a first example, and that's sort of where it came from as well. There was a senior, who was like, okay, well, we have a customer success manager that is allocated, say, 100 owners. And that was kind of how we actually worked out the numbers. We can allocate you 100 property owners, and you would deal with them on a day-to-day basis. 100 is actually very, very high amount of customers to actually deal with, and even then, that's a hard piece of work. But it was when you get to the 400 properties, okay, we've got 4 CSMs now, but then we're sort of talking about adding a headcount for every single time, we add another 100 properties, just as an example. So we would end up being the largest team and the entire business would be CSMs in order to just deal with conversations every day. And dealing with 100 customers every day, which if you have that sort of portfolio, that's possible, right? You've got a lot of interactions coming in constantly. So that was definitely part of the reason why we got there, and it was the sort of a thing, and we go, okay, well, we need to then move on from that and work out how we can actually do this with developing personas, how we automate conversations, how we automate those sort of things. We then personalize that content to make sure it feels like they're sort of still getting the experience they need with us along the way. Really, to do that, we need to actually understand the customer a lot. It's one of those things where there is understanding the customer for us was really going through that process of how do we then understand you with interviews, for example. So that's the first thing, right? So how do we actually get there? We go and we talk. We understand the customer. We did interviews. We do interviews with people who are actually in the business. So we're sitting around, and we're discussing, "hey, what's actually being asked to you all the time? What are you hearing from guests? What are you hearing from customers? What are you hearing from partners all the time?" So then it's gathering all that information into our CRM is really where we're talking about here, right? So obviously, we bring all of that information to Salesforce. And then that's part of us sort of saying, "All right, we're actually going to set an idea of your persona in Salesforce. We know what cost you are. We know what type of customer you are. We know what journey we want you to go." So it's about actually having that information Salesforce as well and bringing that all together. So we're constantly finding ways to bring information in from there as well. That was a big part of it. Then going on to there, I guess, is the first automation, which is the next one. But it really is a case of then where do we go from there? So how do we start with automation? What journeys do we actually move on to and go there? And part of that personalization was letting owners or customers pick their own journey, implementing the idea of we know your persona, so we're going to set you up this way, but then we're also going to allow you to choose and automate where you actually want to go with those items then as well. So we give you the option of, hey, what do you want to hear from us on what sort of person are you and giving them the ability to actually personalize it for themselves, I think it was a big achievement that we've had and use technology, obviously, to do that by allowing them to do that.

So no that sort of journey that you guys did overnight. It's been a 2-, 3-year journey for you. How do you go from deciding, okay, we're going to have 100 CSMs. That's not going to work. And for anyone that's not in the customer service space, a CSM is a customer service manager. But going from, okay, human glue is not working, we're going to build out. What does that journey look like? And particularly, what was your journey like with Salesforce as you build that out? Because it is a journey, right?

Yes, absolutely. Definitely. Yes. So we were obviously on a different CRM when I first started, and we were in a situation where sort of marketing was using 1 CRM. We started to implement the -- well, we actually started with the guests and customer was kind of how we actually started with Salesforce. And that was just about how we handle at scale all of this information we have on guests and those sort of things. So that was part of the journey there. But really, while we decided to move to it was just a case of -- it was recognition that business was never going to scale. We're not doing this. It really was a case. There was just no way for us to go to 1,000 properties, then move to 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. And that's the goal, right? You really are trying to grow to that point where you want 10,000 properties and everything running really nice and smoothly across all of those, and you're just dealing with edge cases, right? That's where we want to get to. So we started to reach that critical mass at probably 400 properties. That's kind of where we hit that mark of look, this is really going to be a very, very hard thing to do without a CRM like Salesforce, especially, but also that mentioned before of understanding each of the customers, understanding what they want, we need a data to do that, too, right? So, we needed all that information in one place. And then we also needed the technology of okay, how do we implement journeys, for example, part of -- it's just how we're actually going to pick and choose those journeys that these customers go on as well. We would have never got there without implementing something like this.

Yes. I think that's great, like the single source of truth, right, everyone shows what's happening with the customer. But I do also -- we talked about customers a lot. How are you guys also using this to grow your business, the prospective customers? Because we know that, that first impression, those first 2 interactions can really make or break a sale. And in the current economic climate, everyone is really doing their best to try and get that sale. So how did you approach that.

Sure. Look, I'm going to steal our CMOs limeligth a little bit here as [indiscernible] and I worked together a lot of these sort of things. But really, we started with those -- working out those personas and then building journeys to those personas, right? That is 100% part of it. But we also implemented the sales engagement side of things as well. So we have high velocity sales. We have that sales engagement process that we actually go through as part of that. So you're kind of on 2 personalization. We personalized journeys, I guess, there. You've got our sort of marketing side of things, which is what Pardot is going to nurture you. We're sort of targeting our advertising. And then we're sort of tailoring that obviously based on those personas that we've built as part of the sales as well. You've also then got the actual like engagements as well that sales are doing in order to just help get through that scale. We're actually -- to be slightly the marketing team again, we get a lot of leads. It's actually something that where we're going to generate leads. We've got a lot to deal with. And the sales team are constantly going through a lot of leads there, which is a great thing. But part of that is they have to just be able to automate those engagements. I've reached out, I mean you then move on, I need to talk to another lead, but I also need you to know that I'm interested and I'm going to be talking to you as well. So using those journeys, engagements are really, really good. And then it's also just. Part of that is a few other great things we've automated there, too. It's a really good example of, we used Tableau in the business for our reporting. And we're sort of trying to work on really interesting ways to use that sort of technology. So we bring in a lot of data from across the market. We get market data from all over Australia. We get market data from pricing data, market data. We get market data for actual long-term rentals as well. We've got all of that in our database. And the sales guys have this ability to go in, put in your address, put in the details about your property, and then hit next. And basically, Tableau will spit out a PDF that actually has a proposal, which is what does long-term rental look like for you, but what does short-term rental look like for you? And how is it going to be better for you in the long run? So we're crunching the numbers on the flier. The guys, it takes 5 minutes for them to just quickly putting the properties details. And what you get out of that is this is how the short-term rental market is going to perform better for your property as well. Now that's a bit of a not what Tableau is actually designed for at all. It's probably -- I don't think they had that quite in mind when we started using it, but it's been a great tool that really does a good job of putting out a proposal that you just, I guess, wouldn't expect it to do.

I'll have to make sure the Tableau team is that and look into potentially prioritizing that one.

Definitely. Definitely.

But you mentioned a little bit about constantly testing and learning. How are you facilitating that inside your business?