Transforming the B2B Customer Experience with Digital Selling ft. Sudeshna Sen

Adam Kerpelman:

Okay. Hey, everybody. This is the Data-Driven Marketer, sponsored by NetWise. I’m Adam.

Mark Richards:

I’m Mark.

Sudeshna Sen:

I’m Sudeshna.

Adam Kerpelman:

Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thanks for joining us, everybody. And special thanks to our guest this week, Sudeshna Sen, who is the VP of marketing at Merkle. Yeah. I’ll throw to you, Sudeshna, for a quick intro. How you end up at Merkle. And then eventually we’ll talk about how you ended up on the podcast.

Sudeshna Sen:

Hi, Adam, I’m Sudeshna Sen. I head our B2B analytics practice at Merkle. And what I do is that we help our clients solve for complex customer experience challenges or marketing challenges. To give you some context, Merkle is a leading technology-enabled data-driven customer experience management company. Where we help Fortune 10 to Fortune 1000 brands enhance brand value and drive sustainable revenue growth through solving these customer experience improvements and marketing challenges.

Adam Kerpelman:

Awesome. Yeah. We’ve been excited to have you on to talk about that side of… Merkel is a big, pretty well-known name, and it’s a really interesting side of things. The idea that consultants come in, in some context, and say, “Okay, you got to do these marketing things.” And then the extent to which it’s like, now let’s introduce you to the idea of data-driven marketing. But first, I was looking at your LinkedIn stuff to prep for this, and I saw you have a Ph.D. in data science. So it started from data, and then you ended up in marketing. Is that because of the analytics link that gets you into the marketing space, ultimately?

Sudeshna Sen:

That’s a great question.

Adam Kerpelman:

Or did you fall off the data wagon and be like, marketing’s way more fun, I’m going to go do that, and then they came back together again?

Sudeshna Sen:

Yeah. That’s a good [inaudible 00:07:47]-

Adam Kerpelman:

I’m one of them. I went to law school.

Sudeshna Sen:

No, it’s a great question. It all started with, of course, my love and passion for data, analytics, for insights. And in my previous role, before Merkel, at PTV News stats, where I started as a data scientist. That’s when, as I was applying data science to solving different problems, and especially on the marketing side, it just sparked a lot of interest. There’s so much potential and so much we can do to leverage data technology, analytics, and insights to drive and solving for marketing challenges. And that’s where my interest sparked in marketing. And then in Merkle, I think data is the foundation that we use to build on for every challenge that we solve. It’s very data-driven and data-oriented. And right now I think that the sky is the limit in what you can do with data to solve for the different challenges.

Adam Kerpelman:

People who listen to this all the time, this is the broken record part of the podcast. But it really is a remarkable time to be in this space as more and more data becomes available because so much of our behavior is digitized. And it’s just crazy to me the idea that when I imagine my own academic track, stats, and computer science, those things were really far on the other side of the world from where I ended up hanging out. Which were the film nerds and stuff. I came to the creative route through marketing, but I’ve always been a programmer. And so I was always on that CS thing and going, it’s crazy that they merged at this layer of, now we have so much data it’s almost like a video game, and we can do all kinds of fun things that we would count as marketing.

Adam Kerpelman:

Which I feel like is the segue into what you were excited to talk about today, which is the shift, the digitization of that much of experience and life, and behavior, and all that stuff has gotten us in digital selling. And in the same way, digital marketing. I guess the question specifically would be, how does Merkel think about what… How is digital selling different from the alternatives? Or, brick and mortar, or that stuff?

Sudeshna Sen:

Yeah, absolutely. [inaudible 00:10:53]-

Adam Kerpelman:

… I think is what I’m chasing there.

Sudeshna Sen:

Yeah. I think it requires digital selling. Because of the pandemic, there has been an accelerated trend toward digital transformation, which has manifested itself in more and more B2B buyers looking to buy and sell digitally. And that completely shifts the business model, if you will, of B2B brands in itself. While before, they would lean more on their sales rep, on their sales arm, enablement arm to really be that linchpin in terms of building those relationships, high touch relationships, and converting that to a closed deal. Now, because more and more B2B buyers want to navigate exploration and consideration of your B2B product or solution online, it’s a different business problem B2B brands are dealing with. Because now they have to have an experience, a self-serve experience for the B2B buyers to be able to feel and understand what their brand has to offer in a digital environment, which is very different without human touch in the beginning of the journey.

Mark Richards:

The clients you work with, have you seen, or would you say that there’s a trend of B2B buyers behaving more like a B2C consumer?

Sudeshna Sen:

That’s a great question. I think that’s the direction we are seeing. That in the B2B buyers, the way they behave and that in terms of the emotions that come into play as they are trying to get a feel for the brand, and making a decision about whether to go for this particular product or not, I think it’s very similar to a B2C. Of course, B2B is more complex because a buy happens in the stance of a buying committee. That’s not one person, there are multiple people involved towards making that purchase decision. But I think that the way they function or they navigate the buying cycle is very similar in some respects to a B2C, or a consumer.

Mark Richards:

I completely agree, just from what we’ve seen, in terms of needing to influence multiple people at an account. We’re looking to take both a consumer-based approach to the messaging and a B2B approach to nurturing and reporting. Understanding that the velocity is going to be likely much longer, the time to close is probably going to be more extended than it would be if you’re buying track pants, let’s say. The means of communication seem to be becoming more similar to B2C approach, and I don’t know if that’s directly attributed to the pandemic, with everyone being on their devices more frequently where these omnichannel strategies can play out. But I guess, could you speak to ways that you guys are helping your clients address the different personas within those buying committees? You might have a data person to influence, you might have a finance person, and you might have an IT person. Can you talk about the challenges and maybe some successes you have had helping clients approach those buying committees?

Sudeshna Sen:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the way we approach this is with an audience-first approach. First and foremost, we have to have a very good understanding of who your ICP is, and who is your primary audience? Who are these influencers that we need to have a relationship with who is going to engage with us across the buying cycle? And really understand this audience as well. It’s not just who they are in terms of professionally, okay, these people are, say the CTOs of an organization. But really, personally in terms of what motivates them. And it could be something completely different than what motivates them from the business side. Personally, what motivates them? What are their behaviors, interests, passions, and where are they consuming content? Is it on LinkedIn? Is it on Wall Street Journal?

Sudeshna Sen:

Where are they actively consuming content? And where are they spending their time? Where are they engaging with others? Such that, to your point, we should be showing up across those channels with a message that resonates around what their motivation points are, and getting them to consider us. I think the audience-first approach is very critical. And more importantly, as we are moving towards digital selling or digital buying, as I said, it’s tying that audience insight along with the behaviors that they’re exhibiting as they’re interacting with the brand. So if this particular audience is already engaging with you, your content on your website, let’s understand their site engagement behaviors and tie that, and contextually target them. Rather than treat all CTOs, in this particular example, similarly. I think that those are the nuances that we have brought, which have shown a lot of success in terms of being able to move them to the next best action in the funnel.

Adam Kerpelman:

It’s interesting because before we started recording we were laughing about selling tennis shoes. And the idea that it’s an interesting time to be in B2B, particularly if you have consumer experience. Because a lot of us look at what’s happening in B2B marketing right now and go, yeah, these are not new tricks. Some of them are, and some of the stuff is getting juggled up by things like the cookie list stuff. But the idea of, okay, here’s how we need to target this type of ad for this type of consumer product, to this type of person, is what Instagram is really good at because of the information it has. We just never had to apply it to B2B before, because B2B was pretty much in its lane of, you get on the blogs, you get in the magazines, you’re effectively marketing to business contacts. Sales take it from there.

Adam Kerpelman:

Now users are telling us they’d rather do it a different way by saying that they prefer to not have to talk to a rep. It’s almost half of people would prefer to have a rep-free experience. So they’re telling us, that’s not good enough anymore. [inaudible 00:18:21]-

Mark Richards:

… tell the way you like to do things.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah.

Mark Richards:

We don’t like the way you’re doing things, we’d prefer you marketed to us a little differently.

Adam Kerpelman:

I really would rather just click buttons, thank you. Or, it’s really more like, I would just prefer a two-minute tour video, instead of a half-hour demo, or whatever. Yeah. What’s interesting is seeing that consumer behavior roll into the business stuff and realize that it becomes this… It almost feels complicated to explain sometimes. Because we used to, with B2B marketing, be like, you’re right, it’s a CTO, that’s everything we need to know. They’re to the target person at the company, or persona. And then you have the VPs downstream from them, whatever. But we never had to say, “Okay, the CTO is a gamer who doesn’t like sports. And based on that, we can optimize an ad spend by not focusing on the ESPN channels and focusing instead on Twitch commercials and stuff.”

Adam Kerpelman:

Which is really starting to get into where it’s like selling tennis shoes almost. They don’t even call them tennis shoes. Am I might just dating myself by not using the right term? Footwear-

Mark Richards:

Sneaks.

Adam Kerpelman:

Athletic footwear. Where was I going with that? At least once an episode I lose my train of thought, and I’m happy that we get to edit this out. Oh, yeah, the consumerization. And so, you mentioned it earlier, Sudeshna, in the context of really thinking about the broader idea of digital experience. And so, having it not segmented in the same way, and this idea of, okay, here’s this marketing site, and it’s our billboard that then causes people to set up meetings with sales. That’s not what people want to do anymore. And so now we have to make the websites upfront, it feels like, more vastly interactive. To the point that it almost… Some of the conversations I have about this border on video game design, where it’s like, okay, what’s the journey? We even use the same language, the user journey. It’s like, how nice.

Sudeshna Sen:

Yeah. Your [inaudible 00:21:02]-

Mark Richards:

Go ahead.

Adam Kerpelman:

Go ahead.

Sudeshna Sen:

Yeah. It’s a huge pivot for brands, for B2B brands especially, to rethink how they should be serving that experience. To your point, initially, B2B brands would have all sorts of information, and they still do on their websites, from blogs to webinars, to newsletters, and all kinds of information. But it’s just not very personal, or it’s not very easy to find or easily [navigateable 00:21:40]. It does pivot the thinking around, how do you make the experience, or the content-driven experience, that B2B buyers are having with your website more intelligent and more streamlined, and personalized? And that requires different types of tools and different types of journey-based, audience-based thinking. It’s a total pivot in your business strategy, or your marketing strategy if you will. Or experience strategy, if you will, to enable or empower the B2B buyer to make their own decisions and find what they’re looking for, rather than you just serving them what you think they need.

Mark Richards:

Yeah. I think there’s-

Adam Kerpelman:

It also makes me think, it requires different types of people. I mean, this is probably a great example of why having somebody like Merkle help you with this would make sense because sometimes you don’t even know the people that you need to solve these kinds of problems. When you start to explain it that way, it goes way more from… I think a lot of people are used to, we got a marketing department, we have somebody who takes care of the website. When you talk about it that way, it sounds increasingly like the thing where it’s like, oh no, you need a user experience designer. They usually work over on the software and app side of this thing.

Adam Kerpelman:

But you’re marketing website is now complicated enough that you need somebody to take you through a proper UX design sprint, where you map out all the things and understand the flow through the app, and that stuff. And just the idea that once you start to go down that road of what it looks like to consumerize, but then also to provide that more rich experience, sometimes the problem is a weird thing. You need somebody to tell you, “Yeah, actually there’s this role called a UX designer, and they can help you solve this friction point that your traffic seems stuck on from the analytics.”

Mark Richards:

Yeah. It’s like a key information delivery person. Or, I think back to the tool we just onboarded, the Range-

Adam Kerpelman:

The many. Oh.

Mark Richards:

Yeah, Range is the one I was thinking. And the problem that it solves, it’s like, you almost have to… It’s like an endless feedback loop of people on tech teams working on a project. They’ve got a product or a project, let’s say it’s a widget. They’re working on the widget and they realize, “Hey, we’ve got this issue in our workflow of cataloging, whether it’s the effectiveness of the widget, the performance of it, how people like it.” And then it’s like, “We need to make that part faster.” And then somebody comes up, “Okay, I’ve got a tool for that.” And then that becomes your SaaS tool, and that becomes your B2B pitch. “Hey guys, you know when you get to this problem point and you start talking about this problem? Well, here’s a tool that’s going to eliminate all those problems.”

Mark Richards:

And I think that’s where we’re in this hyper-reactive state of technology and data. Where, once we reach a point, or a team reaches a point of frustration or confusion, that’s the Goldilocks zone for a new tool to come in and either streamline communications, streamline data connections, poured an audience into a DMP, or whatever it might be. Whatever sort of automation. It feels like the game is, to be the first one to identify this problem and tell a great story of how your product will solve it. It seems like that’s the game that’s afoot.

Sudeshna Sen:

Yeah. I completely agree. I think right now, to get to a little bit more specifics of that. Right now, with so much of different ways that the B2B buyers are engaging with us and the ton of data that we can collect about them, not just on our own sites, but through the different ways we’re engaging across different channels and touchpoints. I think data unification and reconciliation become one of the big pain points. How do I know that Joe Smith is the same person who essentially engaged with my website and this particular content, and also happened to click on that ad that I served a month or so back? How do you make all that connection and understand the journey? I think the data integration, to your point, reconciliation, having the right identity graphs to make that all easily understandable such that we can serve the right experience forward is becoming critical. And the tools and data that you need to do that, it now becomes top of mind for all these B2B brands.

Adam Kerpelman:

I’d be remiss if at this point I didn’t plug NetWise, which provides an ID graph to solve a lot of that problems for people. But that’s all I’ll say. The broader question I have off of that is, I’m curious, we have our own ongoing attribution project at any given time over here. It’s a similar data problem, in that you talk about trying to onboard new tools or new methodologies to understand the flow of users through your website, ideally to conversion events. Is that a pipe dream? I feel like I’ve been solving the same thing for 10 years straight, and it just keeps getting more complicated. And we just keep trying to solve it, and everyone keeps agreeing that we should try to solve it, and I keep getting budget. But it’s never solved, and we’re still always a little like… I don’t know, we’re not really totally sure where the traffic came from. Is it a property of… Maybe this is like a Ph.D. question.

Adam Kerpelman:

But, is there some kind of upper limit of physics that we’re up against here, and data, it’s just always going to continue to grow faster than we can corral it for our use? And so we’re always going to be chasing one slightly more granular data point deeper into trying to figure out traffic attribution?

Sudeshna Sen:

That’s an excellent question. I think that’s something that I think all of us are looking to solve. What makes it more challenging, is that the media landscape keeps evolving and changing. We are adding so many new channels and touchpoints, a deluge of channels. And on top of that, with the privacy laws. And the deprecation of thought party. All of these, the data and privacy and media landscape evolutions, don’t help. We thought that we got it right with multi-touch attribution, but now that it’s all digital and we can connect the dots. And guess what? With third-party cookie deprecation, we can’t do MTA anymore, it’s going to go away.

Sudeshna Sen:

Now we are starting to look at, should we go back to our roots, and look at medium mix models to general directionally get a sense on which media and touchpoints are working? Or should we be looking at, say, micro-segment attribution? Maybe at a little granular level, we can get to an understanding of which audiences are working well. But I think that attribution is going to be an ongoing question all marketers ask. And incrementality tests, which is the age-old way of figuring out what’s working or not, it’s going to be the standard way, given the complexity and the evolutions in this space.

Adam Kerpelman:

I love the extent to which… And it’s a funny context, because it’s all about commerce and capitalism. But one of the things I’ve always enjoyed in a long career at the edge of this stuff, personally, is this cat and mouse game that is interesting. And it’s a combination of regulation and best practices, and technological evolution. I think of it in the SEO context a lot. Google doesn’t tell us the changes they’re making to make a better search engine, we have to reverse engineer them out of the update, and then proliferate that to the community of marketers. And in that way, it’s that same sort of cat [inaudible 00:30:51] and mouse-

Mark Richards:

… cottage industry exists.

Adam Kerpelman:

And so, you just described a situation where we came up with what was the best we’ve ever come up with for attribution for this stuff. Part of the thing about attribution is it’s not always a forward path, you have to back up sometimes because the landscape changed. To now you’re going, okay, right, we can go back to media mix models and affinity sources. And it’s like, I always know… Roughly the same demographic as reading golf magazine, than it was 20 years ago. And will be in 20 years from now. It’s good enough. We can do better with digital tools, right?

Adam Kerpelman:

But yeah, it’s a funny version of trying to solve data problems. If you’re just tasting math all the time, it’s like you just go after the next thing. It’s like, okay, we proved that theorem now we’ll do the next thing. This is that weird version of, it’s like, you do the science and the data-driven stuff to get to the point where you’re like, “Oh, this is the best way to target people.” And then maybe the government goes, “That’s too creepy.” And then you have to roll back [inaudible 00:32:02] best-

Mark Richards:

Great segue, actually, into one of the questions I had written down. It was just around this idea of too big to fail. The things that exist because they have to exist in advertising, one of those big Facebook. Facebook ads have been a bedrock foundational piece of so many marketing teams for the last, I don’t know, 10 years, maybe more. However long they’ve had that ads platform. But as Kirk was saying, now with Cambridge Analytica, with GDPR, Facebook has become objectively, or I guess not objectively, but supposedly less powerful. And I’m wondering, because of the limitations on their targeting, the less interest, the fewer affinities, and less behavioral and demographic targeting capabilities, are you seeing people pulling out of Facebook? Are you seeing budgets go into other acquisition channels that used to live and thrive and convert really well on Facebook? Especially, [inaudible 00:33:14] also with people being able to opt-out, with iOS 14, being able to opt-out of conversion tracking. I’m curious to get your take on that.

Sudeshna Sen:

That’s a great question. And actually, I would say it varies from client to client. I think that the clients want to be where they see that the investments that they’re making in media truly drive returns. And despite that, everything that’s going on with Facebook, we still continue to see returns. In general, I do not see a shift of dollars or media investments away from Facebook. I’m making a very generalized statement. Though, of course, it’s less about what’s going on around all of the news around Facebook and data privacy. It’s more about, what’s working for the particular client, and is Facebook able to deliver against the targets we set up against? And as long as we are able to, we continue on that path with them.

Mark Richards:

It sounds like, yes, there are some brands pulling back. But it sounds like on the whole… And you’re probably under NDA to talk about specific clients, which I understand. But yeah, I’m forever skeptical. Ever since the Cambridge scandal came down I’ve been skeptical as to whether brands would be able to effectively leverage that ecosystem, if there was enough trust inherent to that ecosystem. And maybe it’s Instagram, maybe that trust has just transferred over and people are more engaged on Instagram. It was just a hypothetical existential question. And also, I manage the budgets for our ad campaign, so I don’t want to be wasting money where I don’t need to.

Adam Kerpelman:

For sure. Yeah. I think maybe a way to start wrapping this up, one of the things, Sudeshna, that we talked about earlier and didn’t get to yet, was the importance of capturing first-party data. We work at a data company, so to us, that is obvious. I’m curious, first why it’s important. But then also, is there anyone out there resistant to the idea of capturing first-party data? Is this that new an idea? I’m so deep in it for so many years now that it’s like, yeah, you set up analytics right away. Right? I guess not.

Sudeshna Sen:

That is a great question. I think almost all clients of ours, at least realize the importance of first-party data. And I think they are realizing, even more with the deprecation of third-party cookies, how important it is for them to accelerate the efforts of capturing it even faster now. I think that many of the clients are pivoting in that direction. I think what they’re also increasingly realizing is that you don’t have to wait until the very end when your potential visitor is giving you the contact information. There are a lot of people right now engaging with your website, engaging with you in multiple ways. You might not know them right now, but you will at some point get to know them, so start understanding those audiences.

Sudeshna Sen:

We have ways in which we can actually, at Merkel, we can tag the site and make it even more intentional to capture the first-party data. As an unknown visitor is engaging with you on your website, we have tags that will help us know, okay, this is truly anonymous, or is it not, do we know that? If it’s truly anonymous, can we find ways of asking them to share their email address so that we know them? There are ways in which we are leveraging these first-party data capture methods with our clients to improve or build their first-party database. And I see more and more clients on that route, trying to build that database right now, as I would say a year back.

Mark Richards:

Would you say the challenge is more in evangelizing, I guess, is what we would call more innocuous conversions or micro-conversions than not necessarily things like a form fill or webinar attended? But things, the very basic moves of category loaded, blog post viewed, a video played to 50%, things like that. You’re saying that certain brands are still coming around to the idea, and Merkel enables brands to understand the importance of capturing this type of behavioral event data, versus just like a purchase or a signup form.

Sudeshna Sen:

Exactly. And lead form fills, those were always there. I think brands do a good job making sure that they’re capturing all the information when a person is ready to become a lead. But even before that, there is so much information we can capture, and then use that to progressively profile and find out who this individual is. We see a lot of tagging, and more importantly, tools and technology like the CDP. The whole premise around that also is, how do we progressively profile these anonymous visitors until we know them contextually, and then fully from a PII standpoint so that we can serve a much more personalized experience to them? And that is where I think a lot of brands are headed. And we, at Merkle, definitely help our clients to get there faster.

Adam Kerpelman:

Awesome. Well, that feels like a pretty good place to wrap up. I think.

Mark Richards:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Thanks again, everybody, for listening. If you want more, you can find us @datadrivenpod on Twitter.

Mark Richards:

There you go.

Adam Kerpelman:

Almost said that wrong. I’m not sure why. Sudeshna, if people want to reach out to you, where can they find you on the interwebs?

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. Any stuff to plug, anywhere people can find you on the internet if they want to talk about this stuff with you?

Sudeshna Sen:

Absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn or on Twitter, just type in Sudeshna Sen, you’ll find me. And, happy to connect. And more importantly, thank you so much. Both of you, Mark and Adam, for having me here. I really had a wonderful time having this conversation with you.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah, thank you. And-

Mark Richards:

Thank you for joining us, we had a great time as well.

Adam Kerpelman:

… everybody else, this has been another Data-Driven Marketer. I’m Adam.

Mark Richards:

I’m Mark.

Sudeshna Sen:

I’m Sudeshna.

Adam Kerpelman:

Take it easy, everybody.