Welcome back. I'm your marketing hero host, Maia Morgan Wells. On today's episode, we've got Zack Wenthe, Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager and product evangelist for Treasure Data. It's a customer data platform that aims to help businesses reclaim customer-centricity by focusing on purposeful engagement. We'll dive into what that means and how CDPs deal with questions of data privacy and tightening regulations along with some personal insights into Zack's career, and of course, his best advice for all you marketing heroes out there. Zack Wenthe, welcome to the show.
Zack Wenthe:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Maia Wells:
Well, I want to start off with a question we like to ask all of our guests. What's your favorite part of your career and how did you figure that out?
Zack Wenthe:
That's a great question. I think it took me a while to figure it out. Ultimately, I've had a variety of roles, but all of them coming down to two dimensions. Dimension one is problem-solving, taking weird, complex, challenging, the big hairy problems that we as marketers face and distilling them down. And then I think as that became core to what I did, then the next part was storytelling. Everything I've done, be it from a marketer, from a consultant, now as a product marketer, all my job is telling stories, talking about our brand and our positioning and our messaging and getting on stage or doing a podcast like this. But ultimately, it's about sharing stories with other people, and that's definitely my favorite part.
Maia Wells:
So as a product marketer, I'm really fascinated by this. You are really sitting in this weird position between sales and product and engineers on one side and marketers on another side. How do you come up with a story that effectively tackles all of the technical points of the products and then marries that with the outward-facing story that marketers might tell to customers, for example? I guess that's both of the things you just mentioned because it's problem-solving. How do I actually tell that story? Can you dive into that a little bit? And how do you actually solve that?
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. So I think the first thing to do is understand what problem you're solving. What pain might your consumers or your customers or your prospects be facing? And more so, a lot of times, I think people rush too quickly to a solution or to a feature to solve that. But I think the next step to really making that actually work is then to peel back the layers, if you will, peel back the onion and really look at what's the emotion behind it? Is the trouble that I'm facing with, am I stressed over it? How does it affect the person? Because whether you're in B2B, whether you're in B2C, ultimately we're dealing with people. And so what is the emotion that's tied to that? And then from there, now you have a roadmap of how do I want to talk about this.
Because if they're stressed by it and you're talking in a very happy and bubbly fashion, there's going to be a disconnect. And so your message isn't going to work. But at the same time, if you've got somebody who's very excited about the future and this new product and whatever, you want to match that. So matching tone and pitch and just emotion is key. And so a lot of that comes from customer research, talking to customers.
One of my favorite things to do is go to trade shows and events and just get out and talk to our prospects and our customers because there's nothing like getting 30 conversations in three or four hours to really dial in your messaging, dial in your conversation, dial in your pitch, whatever. And you're hearing a lot. You're learning a lot. So just that rapid iteration is one of my favorite things. And then you've got to go through the motions. Then we got to, "Okay. Let's look at our messaging framework. Let's put it into a structure and put the work behind it." But I think it all starts with emotion and understanding where your customers are coming from from a feeling perspective.
Maia Wells:
So how does that emotion and those personal conversations tie in with the idea of massive amounts of data? Because we're going to get into that today, talk about data. Are those two things working against each other, Zack?
Zack Wenthe:
Actually, no. I think they can work really closely together because ultimately, data is about understanding your customers. Understanding their emotions is about understanding your customers. So the idea is there are attributes about us that we can gather as marketers, even geographic differences. Start with something really simple, where people are in the country. If it's November and you're in the north, it's probably a lot colder than you're dealing with winter. If you're in Florida, it's a lot different. So being able to understand what they might be doing at that point in time. Tying those little personalization moments into your messaging, into your social, into all of those things are important, and it allows you to craft a better story. So the insights gives you that opportunity from the data to understand your customers from an attribute, from a behavior, from a next step, from a channel selection perspective. Where do they hang out? Where do they engage?
Zack Wenthe:
So now, if 80% of my customers are coming from TikTok, let's say, there's a cadence and a tone that is inherent to TikTok. And so if you try to go on and not follow the predetermined pattern that is TikTok, you're going to have, again, a disconnect. It's not going to work. It's not resonate. So being able to match research and quantitative data along with the qualitative and emotive side really allows you to talk to the whole customer and to the whole prospect.
Maia Wells:
And I love what you said about remembering that we're dealing with people. I say that a lot as well, and really coming from the perspective of providing value. And it sounds like having that quantitative and qualitative side of what you do really helps you to do that and reach that person as a human. I want to take a little tiny sidetrack right now because you mentioned TikTok and I did notice that you are on TikTok. And I have been having conversations lately about whether TikTok works for B2B, for example. And I don't know if you're using it specifically for your job right now because I noticed there was some thought leadership things that I saw, which were great, by the way. Let's talk about TikTok. We haven't actually talked directly about that on this show yet. So here's our opportunity. Why are you on TikTok, Zack, and do you use it for business?
Zack Wenthe:
Well, thank you for even noticing that I have it because I think I've posted two within the last week here. So I'm definitely not an influencer by any stretch. But I think there's an opportunity. One is I am personally always in continuous learning mode. So I've been in the MarTech space for almost 15 years now and I've seen the trends change and I've seen platforms change. And if I want to be able to talk to marketers about what they're doing and what they're experiencing, I feel like I have to have some basis in some reality to base that off of. So one, it's an experiment to get out there to try it, to be able to create some content. But yeah. My goal is to look at this from a business perspective, do some thought leadership, talk a little bit of mix about what I do in my role. And ultimately, yeah, that does feed back to what we do at Treasure Data and talk to customers.
But really, my customers from a B2B perspective are marketers. And so being able to help marketers and talk to marketers and talk to sales professionals and whatnot, to help them level up some part of their career, ultimately I think benefits both me personally, our brand, and ultimately the marketer. So that's where I'm going with it. It's a work in progress.
Maia Wells:
And so are you doing short form advice in general about career? Are you doing dance trends? What kind of content are you doing on TikTok?
Zack Wenthe:
I am not dancing that. I'm definitely not doing dance. No. Yeah. I'm going to do short form. So again, going back to one of my superpowers is storytelling, is going back to talking about the psychology of storytelling, how to frame a message, how to use, especially since consumers have a very... I don't know that they have a very short attention span, but I think they have very strong filters. So I think people are quick to dismiss content that's not relevant, content that's not interesting. And so talking about how to create a hook or a message that resonates. I spend a lot of time internally working with our pre-sales org, doing demos and presentations, our sales team. And so a lot of that is around how to create a compelling presentation, how to create something that's interesting that's memorable. Emotion is ultimately what drives memory. So being able to tie into those memorable moments.
So that's where I'm starting, at least because I can probably talk about that nonstop for a while and see. But yeah. Who knows? It's a work in progress and I keep trying and testing, but I definitely think TikTok a year ago, I would've said... Now, it's for kids, although I knew better. But at the time, it was, I think mostly. But now, there are a lot of B2B professionals who are starting to drive a lot of content, some from humor, some from education. But I think it's just short form in general I think is a great addition to anybody's toolbox.
Maia Wells:
Yes. And we've been hearing a lot lately about zero click content or no click content and just give the nuggets of the information on the platform that you're using and just don't use that as bait to click on your full form teaching or whatever it might be. So I'm experimenting with that in my stuff that I'm doing outside the podcast. Have you been experimenting with that zero click idea? I guess TikTok is part of that because you're not going on there and saying, "Hey. Click on this thing to get the full idea." You're actually just giving the idea. And if you haven't seen Zack's TikTok, go and check it out because there's a story about how he used a plant to get his way. And so we'll have to have you guys go and search for that.
I did the same thing actually, Zack, a long, long time ago. I was trying to get my first professional writing gig and I did a similar thing with burritos. So getting that hook in there is very important. I want to just talk a little bit about that zero click idea. Have you been experimenting with that at all and how's it gone so far?
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. Absolutely. At Treasure Data, I mean, it was part of our content strategy is definitely pivoting more and more towards that. I hosted a LinkedIn live, talking about ways to implement a customer data platform when you're limited on resources, when you have a smaller team or people are busy with other things. So that was something came out of a conversation with our sales team of like, "Hey. We'd love to have some content about that." And so we said, "Well, let's just do it. Let's not gate it. Let's put it up there and do it as a LinkedIn live." I think it's a challenge sometimes for B2B companies because a lot of the content you put out may be content you don't want your competitors to have or gets into NDA territory a little bit. But I think there's so much content and so much just top of the funnel education in the category, why CDP for us or just trends we're seeing.
I think there's so much opportunity to just build rapport with listeners, with audience, with readers, whatever that may be, that I think zero click makes sense. Again, our filters are so high that we know what happens when we fill out a form. And so we're going to avoid engaging with content. Even the best content out there, I think unfortunately gets ignored a lot because there's that friction. There's that hurdle. And so testing the idea of opening some of that up I think is definitely worth testing, at least at a bare minimum.
Maia Wells:
I mean, it seems like a good way at the very least to build brand awareness and at least some kind of positive feeling out there that your brand cares to share the information in the first place. You mentioned CDP, and I wanted to dive into that a bit because our listeners may or may not know much about what a customer data platform is. So talk to me like I'm a five-year-old and let me know what is CDP?
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. So a customer data platform at its core, its promise, is about creating that 360-degree view of a customer. So we want to know who you are across all of our touchpoints, across all of our channels, across all of our interactions. And unfortunately, to often in MarTech, there's fragments. The email marketing system knows what emails you've read and what you've clicked on. The point-of-sale system knows what you've purchased. Sometimes, the SMS system knows what coupons you've downloaded and so forth. And then when you talk to an enterprise company with thousands of channels, global, potentially multiple brands, that problem just becomes multiplied 10 over. So at a core, the customer data platform is about bringing all of those fragments of people together to create that single profile so I truly know who you are as an individual, all the interaction you've had, all the touch points you've had.
So when you call into a call center, they don't have to go, "Have you ever purchased anything from us before?" Because we've all experienced that and it's absolutely frustrating, especially when you just got done making a purchase. So being able to humanize customers again, create those connected customer experiences is ultimately the framework of what a CDP does. And then you can build off of that. You can drive insights. You can activate out channels. You can make all of your systems smarter. But it all starts with creating that customer profile first.
Maia Wells:
And how does that differ or how is it similar to a system like a CRM or even a marketing automation platform that's integrated with the CRM, for example? Because some of those functions sound pretty similar to what you can do with those types of tools. So how does that comparison really play out?
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. So I think V1 of CDPs before they were named, CRMs tried to take that role around collecting data. But really, if you think about it, especially on the B2B side, a CRM is really around managing a sales cycle. It's managing the steps and the process. It's more a tool to manage the sales operations, not the customer itself. The customer is just a data point in that sales flow. And if you've ever worked with CRM data, you've often found how messy and duplicative that data can be. There could be three versions of a lead and whatnot because they're just not that built-in functionality where we... Some companies do it great. Some companies have solved the data de-duplication problem. But really, it's not inherently built into a CRM.
And then when you add in a marketing automation platform, it's great for, again, email, and I'm engaging, or maybe some downloads and forms. But what happens if you go offline and you talk about somebody at an event and the engagement? You might not be capturing that detail. Maybe you are. Maybe you aren't. But when you add that to other systems like transactional or customer support and follow up, there tends to be a point where they're not integrated anymore and there's fragmented customer data.
So at its core, the CDP sits at the middle and becomes the smart hub. We don't get rid of those systems. A CRM still has a function and manages that sales process. Marketing automation is for an email nurture. But can we make those systems smarter? Absolutely. Can we give information that happened in a service channel or a field service rep? Can we bring that back in so that the marketers are not targeting them? If you've got an open warranty complaint, you probably don't want new marketing right now. Just basic little understanding.
And then on the consumer side, on the B2C side, most organizations are dealing with way too much data to be working in a CRM. They're clickstream data, ad channels, all of that interaction data, all those touch points, all that behavioral data, it has to go somewhere. And if it's locked up in a tool like a Google Analytics where it's not really attributed to any person and you're only looking at an aggregate, you're missing out on a lot of insights into your customers.
Maia Wells:
So it seems like just visualizing here that the CDP sits in the middle and you can integrate all of your other disparate systems to flow through it. And then can you trigger actions in those other systems from the CDP? Talk to me a little bit about the practicality of that and how the systems can be connected.
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. Absolutely. So there's a couple of different ways we connect with those kind of systems. One is just the data sync. Now that we've pulled in all this data and we've refined it, we say, "Okay. Well, what does that downstream system, the marketing automation need now to be more effective?" And so being able to look at if it didn't have transaction data in there, being able to put in purchase information, so now you can segment or build your flows off of having that information. Or maybe it's using more of an aggregate-level data. So we create insights at the CDP level, customer lifetime value, predictive customer lifetime value, start layering in machine learning on top of that. And now we can build audiences as well. So we can say, "Okay. Here's an audience that can just be pulled into the marketing automation and it triggers a flow."
So people who are highly likely to buy but have not bought in the last six months. So those are high-value, maybe low-hanging fruit customers that you don't want to wander off, or spent a lot of money but haven't done anything in the last year, the lapsed audience. And so just being able to get access to some of those segments and those audiences sometimes is very hard for marketers. We find a lot of them are doing very manual data polls in Excel or they're asking their IT partner to run a report, and then they have to do it two or three times because they're not all talking the same language. So just democratizing and making that data available to a marketer is a big part of why CDPs have become so popular and so indispensable.
Maia Wells:
And where have they become super popular? What kind of companies are using CDPs right now? And we've talked a little bit around this so far, but I want to ask directly, what is using a CDP doing for those companies? I think you mentioned B2B and B2C separately, so we can take that tack a little bit and talk in two streams there. But yeah. I'm just curious about what kind of companies are using this technology. It seems that the more established enterprise companies would have a lot of work to do to integrate what they already have and move everything into a new central hub. So I guess it's a lot of different questions at once, but I'm getting at who are the best customers that need to be looking at this and what is it doing for them?
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. So let's start with who are the best customers. So I mean, obviously if you're an SMB and you've got only an email channel and a Shopify site, and you've only got a couple of things, the complexity may not be there. You may be able to manage it with... And there's a lot of email tools that are adding basic CDP capabilities or some basic integration capabilities. And it's great because your need isn't there. But when you start to talk about an enterprise that has 10 brands across the globe, multiple geographies, multiple business units and divisions, the complexity quickly outpaces what you can do within a point solution. And so then that's when a CDP becomes more valuable because of just the sheer complexity of the data, like you said, because there are so many different systems and integrations.
But from an industry or from who's using it, I think B2C was first to the game in that only because there was so much data and it was changing so often. So retail, if you think retail is a great example of a customer base that was very interested in this because they have so much data, loyalty system data, purchase data, in-store versus online shopping, and understanding that. And there wasn't a great place to put it. There wasn't that CRM or there wasn't those tools. So there was a much bigger gap. But even over the last couple of years, one of the categories that have really grown is CPG because they don't generally own the relationship with their customers. They might have some channels to purchase, but a lot of the transaction is by their retail partners, their distribution partners, their channel partners. But they realized come the pandemic, all of a sudden, having the end cap in retail store or having primary shelf placement meant very little because people weren't going in the store. They were shopping online.
And so the whole way CPGs went to market changed. And so they figured out having that first-party data, having that customer profile closer and a better understanding of their customers was going to be vital to helping influence even if they didn't own the purchase, influencing that purchase behavior, travel, hospitality, retail, all of those similar stories. On the B2B side, again, I think if you're a single-threaded organization, you have a CRM, you have a marketing automation, a lot of times, that might work. Where B2B gets really interesting in CDPs is what happens if you have three or four, five CRMs? You have three different business lines that all have different CRMs that all sell to similar customers. Well, now, trying to tie those together, keep them separate, but understand, well, what is our total addressable market as a holding company or as a brand looks like? Not by business unit, by our total... What is our total market?
So being able to layer up and look at a higher level is very interesting for a lot of B2B companies and just solving that complexity. And then again, multiply that by, well, now they've got teams in the US, they've got teams in EMEA. They've got teams in Australia all with different CRMs, sometimes with different email or point solutions, different integration patterns, different data that they collect. Something has to broker all of that connection. And so you can either try and do it manually or you can put a system and a process in place that will broker that information across all those systems.
Maia Wells:
One thing that seems to pop out also is the length and complexity of the sales cycle. When you were talking about retail or CPG even, those sales cycles tend to be simpler. Am I going to buy this dress or am I not going to buy this dress today? And so it's like, maybe I might receive that well-timed message the next morning. It seems like that is a much more straightforward, shorter sales cycle that it seems a system like a CDP would really help to accelerate those purchases because it can automatically detect, "Somebody's left this in their cart or somebody looked at this on social and then they looked at this on our Shopify site and then they looked at this again in an email that we had sent on a special on it. So they are ready to buy. Let me go ahead and send them one more message. Or let's get into our SMS," or something like that.
Do you feel like that plays into it at all where maybe the B2C world has a little easier time or it's simpler to use a CDP in an automated way, if that makes any sense? Where when you are in a B2B, let's say your purchase is going to be in the millions of dollars for a contract that took six months to build. Is this the role of a CDP different in those two different contexts?
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. I mean, I think generally, you're spot-on. So in the B2C, it's more around influencing either that purchase or driving a second purchase or just understanding which customers should we focus on because there are so many of them. There's so much competition. How do we engage our audience properly and whatnot? On the B2B side, a lot of it is much more about insights and understanding. What's our market? What's our opportunity? Who's our influencer? And maybe when they leave Company A and they go to Company B, being able to understand that that is still a high-value person. And then following them so that your sales team can engage.
But typically, on the B2B side, it's less around maybe in the moment stuff, though there are a lot of reasons we can look at stitching data together. Who came to an event? Maybe we get the event list. They didn't come to our booth, but they came to the event. They saw our messaging. Being able to bring that event list, attach it to your profile, resolve it so that at least it becomes a history. It's not a lost opportunity. So you can start to look at that journey of the customer. Where did they go? What was first? What was second? What was third? Is big on the B2B side, is that understanding, which is often harder to gather than maybe on the individual consumer.
Maia Wells:
So I want to talk a little bit about customer data and privacy because this seems to be bringing together data points that we're already working with all the time. So it's not anything new. It's a different way of accessing and storing and categorizing it and using it. But do you pay attention to all of the changing regulations around customer privacy and really the legitimate demand for some protection for consumers like me and you? We don't necessarily want people knowing every move we make online all the time. And so how do you balance those considerations either within your own head, your own heart, or within the business?
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. So privacy is a big conversation at Treasure Data. We spend a lot of time talking about it, both from a product perspective, but also just like you said, from a what's important? What do the customers want? And that doesn't necessarily mean what do the people who buy from us want, but what do their customers want? And I think it's an ever-changing space. We know as consumers that our data is now valuable. We've figured that out. People have woken up to this idea that. But we're also willing to give it out. Research shows and studies show and it's repeated over that I'm willing to give up as a consumer personal information if I trust the brand and I know how it's being used and I feel like it's going to benefit me.
So if I'm ordering something online, I know I'm going to have to give out my mailing address because you're going to ship it to me. No big deal. There's no friction there. But I might not want to give you my income range and how many people live in my household and all my preferences because I don't know if I know what you're going to do with that. So I think transparency and trust starts at the brand level. But then from a product perspective, one of the things that we've put into place from a product perspective is governance and controls so that brands can do better. They want better tools to be able to manage. So when an agency's working with the data, maybe that agency actually doesn't have access to PII. They can build audiences, they can build segments, they can use that for ad targeting, but they don't know who the people are underneath. So you limit the risk of exposing data, whether that's from a regulatory perspective or just from a good practices perspective.
One of the worst marketing tools ever created from a privacy perspective was Microsoft Excel because we build reports and data and dashboards and lists in Excel and we share them and we send them across in an email. And if they have PII in them, so easy to pass along. It's so easy to share. CDP now puts it in a system that's logged, security control, has governance. So now you know who's doing what with what and you're able to control who has access to it. And maybe again, you don't see all of the information.
So I think it's a balance. I think opening up and having the conversation around what we're doing with the data, how we're using the data, I think is important. I also think it allows brands an opportunity when they start collecting that first-party data and using it. They don't have to have as many third-party trackers. They don't have to have as many anonymous, scary-looking tools out there. They're not really scary. They just seem scary because you don't know what it's doing. But being able to say, "Hey. I'm using your email to be able to send you advertising on our email channels. And also we're going to upload it to Facebook because then I can target you with some advertising. If you don't want it, you can opt out here." Being able to have that conversation and not have to say, "Oh. We're using these 13 ad pixels because there's no way to really know who you are unless we triangulate across all of those ad pixels." It's a lot different of a conversation.
Maia Wells:
And do you advise using that really plain, straightforward language like, "Hey. We're going to use this to serve ads to you."? I mean, it seems like people are craving that like, "Don't treat me like an idiot. I know what you're going to do with my information."
Zack Wenthe:
Yeah. I mean, I think regulation is going to force that handle a little bit, but at the same time, absolutely. I think the more brands can open up. We saw it with can spam and email. People are like, "Oh. I'm not going to spam you. This is why I'm going to send you emails." I think now we just have to do that at scale across all the channels and say this is how we interact. And the more open brands become, I think the more trustworthy customers ultimately will be, at least some of them, and more willing to give. So there'll be that exchange. You're going to be willing to give information back and forth because you're like, "Oh. I trust what you're going to do with it. You've told me what you're doing and you follow through," which I think is a big part. That's the other part. Straightforward language only means so much if you actually do it. So you have to say what you're going to do and then do it, which happens, again, at a brand trust level.
Maia Wells:
And is that what you mean by purposeful engagement? I noticed that you use that phrase quite often. Talk to me at the end of our interview here about how you use a CDP or data in general or anything we've talked about to create and deliver purposeful engagement.
Zack Wenthe:
So purposeful engagement is around the idea of let's not just spam our customers because we have their information. Let's say I buy from a single brand once a year, every year, but I'm not going to buy in between. So just sending me messages every month because you're running a promotion probably isn't going to have any impact on me. And more than likely, at some point in time, it'll frustrate me. And so I'll either opt out or I'll leave. So by using purposeful, it's saying what does the customer want? What channel do they engage on? How often do they engage? What kind of content do they engage with? If you're a multi-product retailer, for example, and they buy outdoor gear only, and if you're sending them housewares, you're just creating that friction and disconnect that they potentially cause them to go somewhere else.
So purposeful activation or purposeful engagement is really around personalizing your content to actually what consumers' behaviors are, what they care about, the consent that they've told you that they're, "I want to receive this kind of content. I want to receive it in this format." So it's all about just meeting customers where they're at and respecting them, not overburdening them.
Maia Wells:
That's that customer-centric approach and being aware of the emotional connection. I think that's such a great message, Zack, that you shared with us today. Thank you for joining us on the Marketing Hero podcast.
Zack Wenthe:
Thank you.
