39: How sales and marketing can grow together: Insights from Braze Chief Revenue Officer Ed McDonnell

Today on the show, we've got Ed McDonnell. He is the CRO for Braze. He leads customer experience, global sales, and partnerships. He has got 25 years of experience working with many different software companies, and on the show today, we talk about Braze, we talk about the age-old question of marketing and sales, and we kind of, he's sales, I'm marketing, we go back and forth on that conversation and topic, and then we talk about AI and how AI is changing shopping forever.

That and much more with Ed McDonnell. Are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing? I'm Alan Hart, and this is Marketing Beyond, where I chat with the world's leading chief marketing officers and business innovators to share ideas that spark change and inspire you to challenge the status quo. Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential.

Ed, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you Alan. It's great to be here. Yeah, well, I hear you've got some exciting fantasy sports activities planned very, very soon.

They were last weekend. I've been doing fantasy baseball for the better part, it was 30 years this year, and I got together with 10 of my closest friends. We went up to Candlewood Lake in Connecticut, we get together, we come together on Friday, most of us, and we barbecue a big meal and we share laughs and some fun, and then the next day we sit in a room and we draft baseball teams and make fun of each other and do all the crazy things that you would want. What I have learned over the years, it's actually not about baseball, although we all are baseball fanatics, it's 30 years of friendship with these same folks, and the best man of my wedding's there, another guy that was in my wedding, and just a lot of fun and it's something that I hold dear, and mark that spot off and make sure that I get to go do it, but we had a ball and I drafted a good team, so I feel very good about myself right now.

Well, it's amazing to me, I mean, how much people get into that stuff. Oh my God. I mean, everyone becomes a statistician at some point. So what I love about baseball, like doing the baseball side of it is the strategy behind it, because it is a lot of math.

It is a lot of thinking through how to gain categories, not categories, so I love the strategy behind it and how you think about the strategy - that's what's kept me in the baseball side of this thing forever. I think football's easy, it's like one and done, kind of put your team together and go forward and have some fun, but baseball is every week and we have a great group text string that is an all year type of activity, and it's a great friendship moment. I'm not a big major league baseball fan, but, I mean, it's a long season too.

160 games. Yeah. You start this, you are in it. You are in it.

You gotta stay with it. Yeah, you are in the deep pool, so you gotta work it into your process, and you have to have enough tools to make sure you can manage it, so enough information that's coming at you. What I did cool though this year, I built my own draft software. Oh wow.

I coded my own draft software this year and had a lot of fun with it, and it got some things right, got some things wrong, but overall I used it as a way for me to learn some of the tooling and some of the way that you can apply these tools to everyday life and it was a lot of fun. Well, add Vibe Coder to your resume. I'm not there yet. No, I don't know that I want to add it there, but I had a lot of fun doing it.

You are the Chief Revenue Officer at Braze. Talk to me about like, where did you get your start in your career? How did you end up at Braze? Oof.

I'm old. I'm right there with you. I'm not a spring chicken. If you look at the first part of my career, so if you just kind of think in chapters, I did a lot of the roles that report into a Chief Revenue Officer, I did them.

So I was a cold caller out of college for Prudential Securities, but my first job in technology was working for a small market data company called ILX Systems, where I was on the customer support desk. So I was an original customer success manager that would take phone calls from our customers and then go meet our customers and help train them, which led me to direct sales, which led me to sales management, and so I spent the first 10 years of my career at a company called Thompson Financial, the Thompson Corporation - today, Thompson Reuters.

I met my wife there, which is awesome. So that's kind of the first chapter was, and I think all roads lead you to where you are, all the different opportunities and moments, but that first part of my career, I just kind of did the jobs, which led me into sales leadership, which led me into first, second, third line leadership, but then I decided I was going to go start a company, and so after 10 years at Thompson, I got with a group of eight other folks. We raised, you know, A and B money from Draper Fisher and from SoftBank, and we built a tool that sat on top of AOL Instant Messenger to help capital markets and over-the-counter traders share liquidity information, and they were already using the AOL infrastructure, we just built a better mousetrap on top of it, which was crazy at the time.

I was just having my first child and I thought it would be a good idea to leave Thompson to go start a company, but it was what a wonderful experience and we eventually sold the business to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, product is still in use today for some derivatives products that are traded out of those markets, and then that led me through some other companies in the financial services organization, until my run at EDGAR Online came to an end, and EDGAR is a famous, you know, EDGAR Filings?

Right. And so worked with them for a little bit, but when that came to an end, I kind of had to make a decision. Do I want to stay financial services or do I want to try something different? Which was kind of the second chapter, which led me to a wonderful company, not far from where you live, called Eloqua, which was a marketing automation technology, and at the time I had to make some conscious decisions.

Did I want to go financial services and stay financial services? Did I want to pivot and do something different? So this is back in 2010-ish and it was easy to kind of think, how do you get into high growth software? Like at the time it was, it's still pretty early days on what that looks like and had the opportunity to go, and I went from running global sales for a public company to a first line sales leader running a Northeast territory for Eloqua in high growth software, and it was maybe one of the best career decisions outside of joining ILX where I met my wife.

It was, you know, the best career decision I could have made, but it led me to Salesforce, I had a great friend that worked at Salesforce, and I remember him calling me up one day. He was like, "Hey, you are in this marketing technology thing. You know, we just, we have a marketing cloud," And this is like early, early days Salesforce when they didn't really have a marketing cloud, but they labeled something a marketing cloud, and he was like, "You should come over and work for us."

And that led me to meeting the team over at Salesforce and, at the time, it was Salesforce or Oracle, like we got bought by Oracle, or 2012 do you go work for Salesforce or Oracle? And I was like, I'm going to go try this high growth Salesforce thing, like that looks super exciting, which, you know, great platform, great run over the years at Salesforce, again doing second line leadership to third line building the marketing cloud business over the years with lots of help from lots of people, eventually running their Commerce cloud business, their retail business.

We're at Shop Talk, so you know I had the fortune of leading the retail business at Salesforce consumer goods business, but at some point, after 11 years, I was like, "What's next? What do I want to go do?" I wanted to go try something different. I wanted to see if I could do Chief Revenue Officer.

I wanted to do that in a public landscape, and I had a really good friend who left Salesforce not too long before she was the CMO over at this company called Asana, which is a work management platform. I wanted to do something outside of marketing technology. I thought it would be good to expand and go try something different. She convinced me a good idea to jump over to Asana and be their CRO, and I went and I did that and had a ball and, you know, we did some really good work in the work management space.

Ultimately, I really missed this, I missed marketers, I missed the marketing office, the marketing community, and had a wonderful opportunity that led me to meet Bill and meet the team at Braze and see if this would be an opportunity to come and run back what I just have so much passion about, and so I say all kind of roads lead because through that entire experience I had to do all the roles that exist in my office, whether it be sales, customer experience, partnerships, so all of those at some point I have kind of, I did some of those roles, so learned from the ground up.

Got to work with some amazing companies that provided me platforms to learn and grow and build. We sold the company eventually, I wasn't there when it happened, and we had some, you know, that was back in 2008, and if you remember like me, having a financial software company in 2008 was a little rough, and things at EDGAR, you know, definitely fell apart, but those learnings brought me on this journey to where I'm at right now, and so that's my journey from professionally just getting to do a lot of the roles, really being excited about the community I get to work in and I am, every day, I'm so excited to work in the community of marketing and digital experience and work with just some of the most creative, incredible people out there, and I get to go lead that for what I believe to be, you know, the best platform for them to be successful in Braze, and so It's like, that's it.

Yeah, well, and we're here at Shop Talk, so tell me a little bit like, update me on where Braze is today. I think we're just getting started. We're having a lot of fun, right? We are a customer engagement platform.

We are a hundred percent purpose built to help a retailer connect what they always wanted to connect store in app. You know, store an app to your channels, to your customers and your consumers, and we do that for lots of folks. Retail's just one of the places that we serve, but I think we serve the retail community and the digital first community just so well. we have been around for 14 years.

Our two co-founders are still here, so John and Bill. Bill's our CEO, John's our CTO, still here, still doing incredible work and still leading this company with all the passion they had from day one. We just announced our earnings yesterday, so we just crossed 800 million in ARR and on a very solid growth rate in terms of software right now, so I think we're doing really well, but we're also doing really good for our customers and really helping bring them along on a journey.

That's Braze in a nutshell. I love it. I didn't realize 14 years, that's substantial. Yeah, you know, I don't know the whole story of, because I have only been here for eight months, but, you know, John and Bill started at, I think it was TechCrunch Disrupt, and, you know, if you two are listening right now and I got that wrong, I'm sorry, but it was something along those lines, right?

And what I love about it is they saw the disruption that was about to happen in mobile and they built something around that disruption, and today we are, if you are looking to innovate on your in-app experience and connect your in-app experience to your total digital experience, like there's nobody better out there than Braze, and we do it for some of the biggest brands and companies in the world today, and they continue to follow that disruption index and follow where the world is going to be disrupted next, and we have done that for many, many years, and being led by two co-founders that can kind of see the future is a lot of fun.

I wanted to talk to you about sales and marketing. So you are sales, I'm marketing. Okay. We're not always working together.

So I want to get your ideas on like how do you think about bringing sales together with marketing and marketing together with sales? This conversation is older than us, Alan. I know, I know, and it'll go on for decades unfortunately. It actually might, right?

I mean, I think I have been answering this question for the better part of 15 years, but I will say it was a lot harder before, you know, technology has absolutely helped that cause, but sales and marketing, whether you are B2B, like whatever you classify yourself as in terms of whatever nomenclature they use in today's world, B2B, B2C, D2C, blah, blah, blah, like all of those things, there are people responsible in a company for growth, and those people either kind of have a distribution or sales title or they, and the other side has a somewhat growth or marketing type title.

Ultimately those offices have to work really, really well together in order to drive the growth of an organization. 15 years ago, it was sales and marketing alignment, like that was the thing, right? And I think what I love about it is alignment. It's alignment and agreement to do the work and do the work forward.

That's where I see best practices and where I have seen some of the best work happen. Listen, I have been fortunate to work with some of the most incredible marketers in software and it's hard to do 11 years at Salesforce and not run into some of the best marketers in the world. Some of them are CMOs at companies that are right out on the floor here and others are just doing incredible work, and you know, some things that I have learned along that journey are you have to align on what's the vision?

What are you looking to accomplish for your customer? And so there's kind of, in a B2B software world, there's two centers of gravity. There's your customer and there's your account executive, there's your sales engine, and you have to build kind of inside out from those two perspectives as you think about that tight go to market alignment that has to happen, and where I see that alignment really coming together is when the heads of those two offices can agree on this is our customer journey, not our sales process, our customer journey.

How do we build awareness, to acquisition, through contract, through renewal, through advocacy, through second, like that whole journey. If you can agree, and when you agree on those touch points, that's where magic really happens in that alignment, in that agreement, because it's no longer about top of funnel, middle of funnel, which of course you need deep alignment on. How do you manage top of funnel? How do you manage middle of funnel?

Whether that just be through your paid and digital perspectives at the top, whether that be through P&M and brand in the middle, like you need alignment on the programs and the plays and the initiatives that exist in that higher wheel of top to middle of funnel, but ultimately, if you don't have alignment on what's the customer journey, whose role and responsibility is it across that pathway? That is where, my opinion, that's where real magic does happen in the alignment of go to market is when you know, okay, in awareness, this is where we're directing our funds and our programs into build awareness, and there it's all the way down to what are the markets that we're going to go spend money in?

Right. What are we trying to accomplish with the money we're spending in the awareness channel? And then at acquisition, it's like, okay, what are we doing in acquisition? Who is in acquisition?

Whether that be the incredible work we do through our inbound channels, how does that connect to my business development team? How does that then connect down to the account executive? In today's day and age, a lot of it is, what tools are we using to create efficiencies in that entire journey and where do we see productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency, and so that's where I do think tools have made it easier from what I have experienced. When you align on the customer and the journey you want your customer to experience, from awareness to advocacy, that's where you've really, truly built the acceleration that you can see in any organization.

That makes sense. It takes me back to one of my early jobs for business school way, way back, was product marketing. Our solution marketing, I think is what we called it back then, and then I spent a little bit of time doing industry marketing, which put me out in the field with folks like yourself, like carrying the bag. I think that exposure of like, side by side, walking into customers together, really clarified what was really important that I was doing as a marketer and what was not.

In a modern context, like, how should marketers like myself or people listening to this, how should we show up the best way when we're going to go talk to our revenue partners or our sales partner? I love that you brought up the customer, because to me it all starts and ends ultimately with that customer. I deeply partner with our marketing team and the marketing teams I have worked with as you need customer context. Whether you do that through advisory boards, where you are bringing customers together in a group way to gain insights, influence, and understanding from them, into how both we should be thinking about and how they can help influence our product direction.

I think as you just point out, it's being in the field, it's joining those customer calls, listening to customers, understanding from first party perspective what's happening with our customers, what challenges are they faced with? Because I'll tell you, walk around the floor here at Shop Talk, and you have the meetings that I have been having with some of our customers. The problems they had five years ago? They're still the same problems.

Right. But now, those problems are just accelerated because of the noise and the other elements that have come into their world. You know, to your question, "What can marketers do?" It's understand the customer as well as we do, and understand the pain points on what that customer's trying to solve, and let's build together around that.

Hmm. Well, I'm curious if you give me a little inside baseball. Sure. I know baseball is your thing, now, if I want to pressure test my sales colleagues, like how do I, how do I see if what they're telling me is real versus not real?

Yeah. Or how do I know if they're really in it with me? If the partnership and alignment is consistently around the customer and the customer journey, it's not about sales or marketing. It's about the player of the program, and when you go and inspect the player of the program, at any point in that journey, it will quickly become clear, well, is it at the top of the funnel?

Then it's like, okay, what's going on with paid? What's going on with digital? Is it at the middle of the funnel? Oh, what's going on there?

Because the middle of the funnel is where you start to see the shift of where the handoffs are happening. Is it at the handoff level? Is it in which stage of the sales process? Because if you are in the middle of the funnel, you are in a sales process now.

Yeah. So inside of that customer journey, you are squarely in whatever your stages are in whatever company you are running. Right. Stage 1, 2, 3, 4, X.

It's, oh, look, we have a problem at stage three, and stage three is largely the handoff from BDR to salesperson. What's happening and why are we falling off? Then it's no longer about what is sales doing, it's no in our process, in our plays, in our programs, where's the choke point? Then when you go and identify where that choke point is, well then it's, "Okay, do we have a pattern within that choke point?

Is it a certain region? Is it a certain selling organization? Is it certain where?" But that's where I don't want to say like data is the answer.

It is the guide that points you to where the choke points are that then allow you to go make different decisions or different programs within your funnel. You also have to have a cadence around it, and you have to have a process. We have a weekly cadence on pipeline and pipeline effectiveness across our regions, across our motions, across our stages. We meet every week as a team.

It's a religion meeting, like you have to show up to it, and It's uncomfortable sometimes because it's, "Hey, something's not performing." Something's always not performing. Anybody that tells you their pipeline is wildly performing is not telling you the truth, right? There's something underperforming in your pipeline every single day, and it's identifying where it is, and hey, is that by choice?

Like we made a decision four months ago. Here's where it's showing up in your pipeline. Then you get another decision point. Do we want to do anything different or are we okay with the direction of travel of performance?

And that's okay, like we are allowed to make those decisions and continue to go, but you have to have a cadence that allows for that conversation to happen, and allows for the agility to either change or continue forward. So it would not be a conversation today if we don't talk about AI. Do we have to? We kind of do, we kind of do.

How are you looking at AI, either at Braze or in general, today in your function? I think it's a loaded question. You know, we're doing some really incredible things at Braze. I'm really proud of the work we're doing there.

We're really leaned heavily into decisioning. Our decisioning platform is pretty powerful. It's an autonomous agent platform. It helps marketers not have to make certain decisions around what the next best action is or what the next best move is in a campaign or what the next best timing is to send that communication.

It is an autonomous agent based on inputs and levers that then take over for the marketer, and it makes those decisions in the moments that matter most for whatever that program or campaign is running. That's kind of where we started. Earlier in February, we fast forwarded a release on our agent console and our operator products, and we brought them to market about a quarter and a half faster than we originally said we were going to go do. In the first month we have been in market, we have seen incredible results from them.

Our agent console is where you build and deploy agents right inside of a campaign canvas, so, you know, I want a brand voice agent to go and run through my campaign. Good, go deploy it with agent console. You want a sentiment analysis agent running through your campaign. Go and deploy it.

I'm really excited about what we're doing with operator though, which is a conversational AI interface, to where a marketer can go in and say, "Hey, I just noticed that my abandoned card attribution is dipping. Why?" An operator will go through your program and using other connectivity tools like MCP to go, you know, even inside and outside the Braze interface and come back and say, "here's where your campaign is dipping," and then come back and say, "and here's what you should do."

And then you could continue that conversation as you would with any type of agent or console in that way, and go and fix your campaign, and we're seeing incredible uptake in our operator use cases that are out there in market right now. So that's just from a Braze lens, and obviously at Braze we're using the tools to help us go faster as anyone should be. Personally, like I said, I developed a draft software. Right.

And I thought that that was, it was good for me to just learn how to go have that conversation with another tool, but then how it walked me through actually having to build something, and I am not a coder. I have never coded a thing in my life, but this kind of, it gave me perspective on how to do it and I'll continue to lean into those things. What's interesting as you see around here though, because we are at Shop Talk Yeah. I sat with a small potential partner of ours, technology partner, where they built an agent that sits on top of a website.

He showed me the prototype that they're working for for a customer and the customer's a clothing brand in a major market, not the United States. The agent sits on top of the website, so very Agentic commerce like, and it just asks it a simple question like, "show me all that's in this catalog that's on here in an LBD." I was like, "I don't know, what's an LBD?" Long black dress.

Oh, that's how people apparently talk to agents. Right. And the website changed, every single carousel on the catalog on the webpage changed to that model in a long black dress, and I was like, that's cool, and you could see where some of this stuff is going as to how it is going to be such a prevalent part of how, not just technology is being built, I think everybody sees how it's happening, how it's helping and happening in the build of technology, but as people that interact with the technology every day and are simply trying to be better informed or make better decisions, that's where it's really going to show up and I just think accelerate consumer, not just awareness, but consumer behavior.

I love that example because that one little signal from a user to an agent changes the entire experience, right before your eyes. Right before your eyes, yeah, I mean, it happened in seconds. I was like, whoa. That's cool.

We love talking about business. We may talk about business a little bit more, but I want to switch gears, get to know you a little bit better. We know you like baseball. My favorite question to ask everyone that comes on the show is, has there been an experience of your past that makes up who you are today?

Oof, there's never one. No, that's true. I feel very fortunate, right? I grew up a blue collar town, blue collar parents, so my mom was a nurse and she brought herself from.

Mine was an X-ray tech. Yeah, my mom started in her early twenties as one of the youngest nurses at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx of New York, in the cardiac critical care unit, and she took that to, in her career to be the, you know, Vice President of Nursing at St. Joe's Hospital at one point. So, like, she brought in her career through her time, but she was always a caretaker.

Late nineties, early two thousands, flew to the Philippines and flew to Seoul, Korea to go and recruit nurses back into the United States. She was a caretaker to all that were in her presence, and so I learned from that. My dad was a retired cop, right, and also a caretaker in many ways, and a protector in many ways, but super blue collar and a blue collar town called Port Chester, New York, which is right in between Greenwich, Connecticut and Rye, New York, so like we were the little town that serviced the other two prominent towns, but that's an experience that, you know, the friends in the community that I grew up with were, absolutely had a big impact.

My family has had a wonderful impact on my life, whether that be the, you know, my sisters who I just feel so fortunate to be around and they have done incredible things with both their families and their careers, and they are the matrix of our family right now with our parents not here. You know, a couple of years ago I had a pretty big health challenge, like a very significant, serious health challenge, and that's one of the things that led me to kind of think differently about, do I want to stay at Salesforce or not?

It was, hey, if I want to go kind of do CRO, what am I waiting for, right? Like that was, it was a big enough like, "Oh snap." Like this is, yeah, go do it. Live your life and you may fail, and by the way, that's okay, and because you also may not.

But that was, those are all moments, the baseball draft moment, like having a group of friends for 30 years. Yeah. That you get to see, and you may only see them once or twice a year, but when you do those 30 years have never passed, like you are back to the same people you are, and I think all of those have molded me as a human. I am very fortunate to be the father of two incredible kids, my daughter is a sophomore at George Washington University, and the way she approaches everything just informs me, not just as a dad, but even as a professional today, like some of the things she's bringing me, "Hey dad, how would you handle this?"

Or, "Hey, dad, what would you do in this situation?" I'm like, ooh, that's, you are testing me as a leader and actually making me think differently. How do I lead this next generation of people based on what you think and what is important to you? My wife and my son are, they are cornerstones to everything that I am.

I love it. Those deep human connections that we have with others, with ourselves, when we reflect on our own humanity, make moments matter. Yeah, and ultimately, listen. We might be Skynet in three years, like for anybody that knows the reference out there.

Like, it's, it's not 0% probability, right? Like, it might happen. The thing that AI could never take away from anybody is the human connection. Yeah.

If you want it, and if you want to give yourself to accept it, it's out there for you. Like it's out there for you. Well, if you are looking back, what advice would you give your younger self? I get this question a lot, especially in town halls or "Ask Me Anything" type moments, and I have the same answer anytime anybody ever asks me.

Chase experiences and skills, not titles. The workforce has been so trained to chase a title. I want to go be X, whatever X is. What gets lost is, well, "What experience do I need to be successful in X?

What skills do I need to actually do that job?" The advice I give to folks is to be very intentional about the skills and the experiences that you want to build in your careers, that will lead you to a title at some point in your career, but you will actually be successful when you get it, because you will have built the experience and the skill to do that job and do that job well. Whenever I'm with somebody, I'm like, "Instead of talking about you want to be a vice president or you want to be a director, or you want to be this, why don't you back up for a second.

Tell me the skills you have. Write them down on a piece of paper for me and tell me the skills you believe you have," and then I ask them, "Now, write down the skills you want to go and acquire." Too many people get lost in, "Well, I have a gap," or, "I'm not good at that," and it's like, "Well, do you want to be?" It's the question I ask them.

I'm like, "Is that something you want to be good at?" And they think, they're like, "Well, I think I do." Okay, great. Then that's a skill you want to acquire.

But if you don't want to be good at that, don't acquire the skill. Go find something that you want to go and acquire that will actually benefit where you want to take your career and be open-minded to it could be something that you are not actually thinking about, and so that's the, I know it's a long answer to the question. No, it's good. Chase experiences and skills, not titles.

I do think that's lost on a lot of people. You even hear pro athletes, right? Like, if you don't enjoy practice, you are not going to enjoy the game. Correct.

Right. It's a great, you know, to go into the sports analogies. That's right. Yeah, Kobe Bryant worked harder than anybody in his generation of NBA players, and there's so many stories out there, how he would start his day at four o'clock in the morning and by the time nine o'clock came when everybody else was just getting up, he had already been through two workouts, and a healthy breakfast, and he was about to go back to the gym and he's just like, "I got better at, I was better than my peer set because I simply just put the hours in and develop the skills that were important to me over that course.

Is there anything you are trying to learn more about right now? We know you are vibe coding. Yeah, but I think it's important, right? I mean, it's impossible to walk into a conversation and not talk about AI right now, and it's not that I'm trying to learn about AI.

I am trying to understand the applicability for go to market, how to help go to market be more productive and more efficient without impacting growth, so I'm trying to learn those, that's a professional learn that I'm trying to kind of really, really understand. Also, understanding, and a lot of the research that I have read in, and Deloitte has published some of this research, Alan, is that there's no shortage of AI, there's shortage of people using it for use cases that are actually driving the right behaviors to gain the productivity that companies and organizations are looking to deploy.

I am a Gen Xer, and so we have sat between this analog digital world in many ways over time, but what I have always appreciated about our generation is we're unafraid to learn things, and I just want to continue that curiosity, that open-mindedness of: Hey, this is like, this isn't just a thing, it's not a theme, this is a way to improve the way that you show up every day and improve the work that you can do and get more leverage back into your day so that you can go do the creative work, and the real work that matters.

So it's something that I'm pretty leaned into to try and understand. I'm constantly trying to understand team dynamics and leadership dynamics, like I'm very invested in what those look like. I have a really good friend that writes a weekly newsletter. He's been doing it forever and every now and then he will write in one of his Saturday morning blogs, like, I can't believe I'm still doing this, and I always text him back and I'm like, "I can't believe you are doing it either, buddy."

But two weeks ago, he put something out there about team chemistry and it was one of those impactful things that I just, I started thinking about like, Hey, yeah, that's, team chemistry is a real thing. So I use that as an example of I'm constantly trying to find inspiration for what should we be thinking about and working on? So those kind of boil up to the top for me right now. Anything out in the world that you are just curious about?

Spark your interest? I'm a pretty boring guy from those perspectives. I love fantasy books and so those always keep me pretty, pretty grounded in thinking about world building, and what worlds can be built and how does that all come together? So over last summer, I got hooked into Sarah J.

Maas and Throne of Glass, and that was a wild experience to kind of go through and Red Rising through Morning Star, which kind of blew my mind as I got through the end of that, so just trying to find different authors and different things to keep me super occupied. I am an avid golfer. I am not good at it, but I have more gizmos and gadgets to try to help me get better at it on a day in and day out basis. And so those are things that I try to keep pretty grounded and pretty simple, and, you know, being the CRO of a publicly traded software company keeps me kind of on edge on a daily basis.

I tell Bill our CEO all the time, I'm like, "I'm really stressed, but don't worry, I have got that stress that you want to wake up to. Not that makes you want to go to sleep." Right? Like, because those are the two different types of stress out there.

There's the one you wake up and you are like, "I'm ready, like let's go," and then the one like, "I need to go to bed because I am exhausted." So that keeps my brain really, really going that I don't have to be so curious about, but that I can just have fun, and be me, and kind of do the things that I enjoy, and golf and reading are two that really come to mind. Golf is one of those skills I chose not to be good at. So, listen, I have chose golf, it has not chosen me.

Right, okay. Fair enough, fair enough. Two more questions for you: What do you think is the largest opportunity or potential threat facing marketers today? It's going to sound weird, but themselves.

Oh, well that's fair. It's because, and you walk around this great conference that we're at and I walked by a booth and there was a gentleman speaking around a crowd and in a matter of 90 seconds he said, "The old way is dead, we have to go do it the new way." I don't have, no idea what he was talking about, by the way, because I like walked by the booth, but in the time I walked by that booth, I heard him say it five times in a row, and I just kind of thought to myself like, he's not wrong.

Whatever he's talking about, he's not wrong, because and it's not whether the old way or the new way, it's just, I think every marketer has that opportunity today to really be the thought leader for their company at the board level. They are the growth engine. I love the marketing community. It is my favorite community to work with.

It's my favorite community to be around and to interact with. It's why I chose to want to pursue Braze as that next step in my career, because I wanted to come back to it. They own the growth of an organization. They own the direction of how growth gets accomplished and whether you are one of the largest manufacturers in the world, whether you are a B2B software company, the marketing office owns the growth strategy of the company, and they're the ones that have to execute that growth strategy.

What an incredible place to be, but if the marketing office doesn't also continue to evolve as to how to do that, not just cost effective, the easy thing is how do we do that cost-effective and profitable? Of course, like the world is told us that already has to happen. It's how are we evolving to make sure that we are reaching customers, consumers, patients, clients, whatever it is in your wheel of what you are servicing, how are we going to do that and do that effectively? We have some research out there that's specific kind of to retail and consumer brands where we did a survey, I can't remember how many people were in it, but it was enough.

You know, 93% of brands said that we're doing great on engagement and experience with our consumers, and we surveyed the same consumers and shoppers and 53% said they feel like the experiences are great. It's like, that's a pretty wide variance in how marketers feel, and brands feel, and how the shopper and the consumer or whoever feels, and I think that's the opportunity is don't just think you are doing a great job, like are you actually meeting that customer, that consumer, that client, that distributor, that patient, whoever it is that you are interacting with, are you meeting where they are?

Giving them that experience that they're looking for that will make them feel like they're part of your community. I don't know. You've been doing marketing for how long, Alan? 20 years.

Yeah, long time, right? Yeah, long time. One-to-one personalization. Right time, right moment, right message.

How long have we been? A long time, yeah. But it's never been more available. That's very true.

It's like today, that's never been more available to every marketer in the world, regardless of the company that you work for. Yeah. That to me is, wow. Yeah.

Like the moment's actually in front of us right now to go and accomplish it. Agreed, well, last question for you: In a sentence, what do you think is one way Agentic AI is going to change the way that we shop? We have been spending 20 minutes together here. I don't have one sentence for anything.

I think it's the experience I just talked about with that company I just shared. We no longer live in an age where you are just going to go to a website, look for something, buy something. You are going to curate it to the best of your ability. It is going to be like Google was back in the late nineties.

You are just going to go to a blank webpage that has a simple text bar and you are going to say, "I have an event on Saturday night. It's with my partner. We're going to be with friends that we have known for 20 years. There's going to be alcohol involved.

What should I wear?" And it'll cur-, like, it will know enough about you to curate, here's five options. Which one, you know, what next path do you want to take? Is it going to be a formal evening or do you want it to be more casual?

And you will just keep going down that until you get to the best offer for you. You will click on it. It'll take you to that brand's website that allows you to then go and purchase, and that's, I think we're going to an experience like that, and you could use that for, you are buying an outfit you can use that for, I'm going to Rome and I'm going to Rome with my partner. We're going to spend three days.

We want to do 50. You can tell it. I want to do 50% sightseeing and 50% relaxation and curate it for me. Then the next step will that be, do you want to do that with guided tours or do you want to do that on your own?

Guided tours? Here's the five guided tour companies to use with. Okay, I like this one best. Do you want to book it?

Yeah. Like that is the, I think that is the Agentic. We can call Agentic commerce because we're at Shop Talk and everybody wants to call Agentic Commerce. But to Ed McDonnell, that's, "I want to go to Rome, and I think that that's the, we'll be there very fast.

Where I do think AI will just accelerate everything is in consumer behavior and in consumer experience. It'll take longer in B2B and in corporate land, I believe just because the adoption curves, it'll be faster than the last. It'll be faster than the internet, but it's still not going to be tomorrow. But I think in consumer behavior where you are already seeing just insane innovation and experiences.

Love it. Yeah. Well, Ed, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you.

It's been great. Alright. Hi, it's Alan again. Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte Digital podcast.

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