Proving the Advantage that Marketing Creates

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

Speaker C: Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall. Today I've got Samrat Shamra with us and Ian Khan. They're both partners at PwC. Ian is also the customer and commercial excellence platform leader. Um, we're here at Connections in Chicago and yeah, that's a good place to start actually. Well, first, welcome to both of you.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker C: So how many Connections have you done? We'll start with. You mean.

Speaker B: That's a good question. Um, let's say 10.

Speaker C: Okay, so you've been 10 most and uh, Samrat for you.

Speaker A: Mine's most between 0 and 10. This is my first one actually.

Speaker C: Yeah, this is my first too, which is crazy because I worked with Exact Target for years and uh, never got to this. It was always Dreamforce. M. Samrat, let's start with you. When did you get to PwC? What's your background? Where do you come from?

Speaker A: So I've been with PwC sort of different reincarnations of this for a little over 20 years. So I came in through an acquisition about 12 years ago. Uh, so I grew up as a strategist, um, in consulting, kind of helping companies drive the growth agenda, develop their long term growth strategy, et cetera. Came into PwC and that was around the time that PwC was growing its front office business. And I had done a lot of work around brand and stuff and we kind of launched the marketing practice. In the last few years I've been really kind of working at the intersection of growth strategy and brand strategy and marketing strategy. So it's been a fun, exciting ride.

Speaker C: Ian, how about you? Your background, where do you come from?

Speaker B: Well, John, uh, I've grown up at PwC professionally. I'm nearly 27 years now with the firm. Uh, I was hired right out of college after spending roughly a decade doing CRM, uh, consulting for my clients. Uh, had the opportunity to actually uh, launch the Salesforce consulting business within the firm. Uh, which I led and grew for a number of years. Uh, and now I oversee the broader customer and commercial excellence portfolio at PwC.

Speaker C: Okay, and so tell us about the group that you're working with then. So obviously they're all on board as Salesforce implementations that you're running with, but kind of who are your ideal clients here?

Speaker B: Well, we work with clients across just about every industry and um, a lot of our work is with large enterprise companies, but we also work with uh, private businesses and high growth startups. You know, we've got A very diverse portfolio. Ultimately, you know, we're looking for clients that are transforming some aspect of their core business. And the work that Samrat and I do is really focused on starting with the customer journey, understanding where the growth opportunities are, helping our clients to identify and then pursue those growth opportunities and providing a full range of solutions, starting with strategy, but down through the functional capabilities, the industry process capabilities enabled by technology. And we even have uh, a large managed services business as well as.

Speaker A: And I think what Ian just kind of highlighted is very much the reason we are all integrated as one team is because today's clients, one, they themselves are going through their reinvention. And for them the most important M aspect of having a partner like us is to help them not only get from establish their North Star vision and strategy, but then also kind of walk along with them and help them get to the outcomes. At the end of the day, gone are the days of these large slide packs that are sitting on a desk somewhere gaining dust or large big transformations that are being done in isolation without a real connection to what the business strategy needs to be. I think what we're increasingly finding is the need of the hour. And what we're hearing from clients is like, hey, we are operating in a very kind of dynamic environment. A lot of changes, et cetera, help us uh, think, think through together where the puck is going. How should we build a business that will be successful not only today, but sets us up for success for the long term and help us deliver uh, against the business outcomes today and in the future.

Speaker C: Okay, and so then as a major partner, what are you guys interested in? What have you seen and want to learn about here over these next couple days? What's the hottest thing going?

Speaker B: Um, we're partnering very closely with Salesforce on um, you know, everything they're doing right now around Agent Force. Uh, you know, all of our clients are interested in understanding where the value creation opportunities sit with AI and you know, fundamentally, you know, there's a strategic element to that that starts with understanding customer wants and needs and market opportunities. Salesforce has established a very strong position in the market with AgentForce as an orchestration layer and they're providing clients with access to pre built agents across the customer journey. So we're working with our clients and working with Salesforce to understand how do we take advantage of those opportunities in a way that creates value for our business. I think the other thing that we're pretty excited about is everything Salesforce is doing around the customer360 that data layer that at the end of the day, you know, we think our clients have the opportunity to create value by leveraging their proprietary data sets, the insights that they have and to their customers that are really unique to their organizations, but making sure that that data is available and we're unlocking the value of that data in these agentic journeys. Ah, I think that's an area where right now we see pretty significant opportunity

Speaker A: building on where Ian was talking about. Right. I think. And this is where the value of the partnership between PwC and Salesforce really comes to life. We're working very closely with Salesforce around identifying not only the current use cases or domains where these things can be applied, but also the future roadmap of applicant use cases, et cetera. So we're co developing with them, which I think a lot of our clients actually value because we are able to bring that business understanding from 175 years of actually being in the professional services and consulting business and bringing that into that. The second piece is, um, I go back to that financial operational rigor. You only can impact things you can measure. And our legacy as being on the trust side, on the accounting side actually gives us a great advantage to be able to kind of understand the love language on the business as well as on the technology side. So increasingly when we are uh, going to market with Salesforce, we're actually bringing the business case. We're helping Define the KPIs. We're actually helping them, helping our clients understand how they can drive the change management to get after that. And that's where the exciting part is for us. Right. Because that's what really, you know, motivates us at the end of the day to be able to kind of say, hey, we're working with this great technology, but we are also working with these great brands and products and we're being able to bring that together in a way which we can measure and reward uh, ourselves collectively.

Speaker B: Yeah, let's put points on the scoreboard. And it's to be clear, you know, it's, it's not how many agents have we deployed and what is the adoption? I think maybe six months ago we heard versions of that conversation in a lot of places. But I think the conversation has moved and today it is really what is the business value we've created? Did we move the needle on conversion rate? Is average order value greater? Because we're making smarter recommendations to our customer? What is the business value that is being captured as a result of these, you know, intelligent enterprise level capabilities that we're now able to deploy with the cutting edge technology. So we've got to focus on that value capture piece.

Speaker C: Yeah, we've seen so much of that. Companies are like, well we only get to 75% adoption or get X number of employees using it or whatever. And that's just.

Speaker B: It's not the thing if you don't

Speaker C: have dollars behind it. Yeah, none of it matters, that's for sure. We have to take just a second. These interviews would not be possible without the support of our sponsors. And today's episode is sponsored by Incubita. If you're a regular listener, you know the old way of marketing with creative media and data stuck in silos just doesn't work anymore. Incubita is a global marketing and AI outcomes agency and a premier global Google partner. They help brands outperform marketing, delivering an average of 35% revenue growth in just the first year. What does that look like? It's about turning ambition into action instead of disconnected efforts. Incubita uses their seamless technology to bridge the gap between short term wins and long term profitable growth. They simplify the complexity of the modern stacks so you can optimize scale and future proof your funnel. They have the global footprint to back it up too. With 18 offices and 20 years of experience, Incubita is trusted by global leaders like l', Oreal, Harrods, ING and Les Mills. These brands trust them to transform marketing complexity into total clarity through transformative strategies and award winning execution. In practice, this means using AI to connect your creative strategy directly to business outcomes. You'll rebalance your investment to unlock untapped growth and use intelligent automation to make your bidding and messaging more cost effective. Stop doing marketing and start to outperform within QBITA. Visit incubita.com to see their proof of performance and discover the future of AI powered growth. That's incubeta.com Again, incubita.com, check them out and we thank them for their support of the show. Uh, okay, so announcement this week and uh, talk in general about going to headless versions of Salesforce. It seems like for PwC, that would be fantastic that you guys have got all kinds of enterprise places to plug in. I mean I want your take on it though. Tell me what you guys think.

Speaker B: We're pretty excited about it. I mean, I think we've been there and we've been having that conversation with our clients for a long time. But you know, our clients also are, are looking for platforms that make it easier for them to get to that next level agentic orchestration experience layer without the need to invest in and develop on lots of different platforms across the journey. I think what Salesforce is doing now, given their place in the market and the breadth of customer capabilities that, that they can provide with Headless, you know they're, they're giving clients a faster in some ways uh, just a more efficient path to value than they could accomplish on their own. And so I think it's, you know we see this as an enabler of speed, uh, you know, as much as anything.

Speaker C: Um, you know an interesting thing where PwC fits in perfectly is we're kind of watching how everything's shifting to you know it just used to be seats and you kind of had a fixed expansion but now as you're turning all this stuff on, consumption becomes being able to switch to consumption billing. Are you guys setting up framework to be able to monitor that stuff? Is it a concern even?

Speaker A: I don't necessarily think that's a concern. It's a natural evolution of where the business needs to go anyways. Right at the end of the day we need to be collectively ready and prepared to meet the market and meet our customers where they want us. Right. We need to uh, align our incentives with their success. So it's a very natural evolution of that. And that's where we're actually spending a lot of time with our clients even before we get into the technology kind of implementation piece, really designing and understanding the inner ways of working so that when they undertake that transformation and technology uh, journey we are able to help them get to an optimal cost of ownership around the whole thing versus just you know, the traditional model of hours and seats, etc. It is purely and very simply aligned to the outcomes that they want to kind of get after. In fact we're doing some cutting edge research around this as well. Not only in partnership with Salesforce, et cetera, but also more recently we just launched this um, really uh, industry leading research with uh, the association of National Advertisers, the ANA and Cannes Lions around the value of marketing. Very often, uh, today with AI, this AI is posing both a great uh, opportunity but also quite honestly a big threat to marketers where the CFOs are hearing about the talk track around AI and going to the CMO or the CIO and saying hey, give me 20, 30% back, right? So one of the research piece I'm just talking, uh, we just launched, looked um, at Cannes Lyons Awards over the last five years, looked at FE Awards over the last five years, looked at Interbrand kind of reports looked at uh, 10Ks for two, you, uh, know, 2,000 of the biggest public companies out there looked at total shareholder return. And we did the math and the math was clear. When companies invest marketing with great operational discipline, with great focus on strong focus on brand development and with a high focus on ROI, they deliver uh, 80% greater shareholder return over five years than the rest. And actually we also tracked it and we treated as if that cohort of companies was an ETF that would have outperformed the S and p by almost 2x. Right. So the age old question of does marketing add value? We're also doing fundamental research around proving and helping the CMOs, helping uh, their teams take it up to the C suite and the board and prove that hey, it does deliver value when it's done right. And AI can be a great catalyst for us to kind of unlock that flywheel that allows us creates the investment capacity for us to modernize and continue to drive the elevated customer experience that our customers and consumers expect of us.

Speaker C: Good deal. Is that report public actually? Can we get captured or is that client only? What's the.

Speaker A: No, it is actually the jointly published with the ana.

Speaker C: Oh, okay. So it is out.

Speaker A: In fact, Ian and I uh, ran a salesforce had invited us to actually Talk to about 50 CMOs last night and share that report with them. So happy to share that with you.

Speaker C: Yeah, that would be great. I'd love to check that out and dig into that. Today's episode is also brought to you by Framer. Framer is a complete website platform, not just a builder. So teams can launch and keep improving their sites in one place. Thousands of businesses, from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes can take minutes instead of days. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. Agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale. People bring taste, judgment and control. Agents solve the gap between AI generated ideas and production ready website work. The agent works in the same place where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed and published. It lands on the canvas, stays editable and can be published when the team is ready. Agents and framers work alongside teams to streamline collaboration on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings and ship everything all in one place. Framer is an enterprise level solution powered by agents that provide premium hosting, enterprise grade security and 99.99% uptime SLAs that give the world's leading brands like Perplexity and Miro the confidence they need to build their websites in Framer. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a framer specialist or get started building for free today@framer.com MOC for 30% off a uh, Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com MOC for 30 percent off f R-A-M m e r.com MOC rules and restrictions may apply. Yes, check it out. Take all of the website headaches out of your life, make it easier to do business, respond faster, put AI to work to simplify for you. Again, framer.commoc and we thank them for their support of the show. Okay, how about for the next six months now, everything you see today, where do you think things are going to go? You know what's on your radar as things you're telling telling your clients they need to be aware of Right now

Speaker B: we think in the next six months a lot of our clients are going to evolve their commercial organizations. Uh, greater ownership for end to end customer journey is a really important topic. Um, still a lot of organizations have chopped that up. The CMO might own the marketing piece of the funnel. You get into the chief revenue officer for the sales piece, you get into the experience officer for the service piece. And the customer is kind of experiencing your organization chart. And so I think one of the big topics that we see on the horizon is a new customer, a new front office operating model that's really actually designed around the customer. It's kind of a novel concept. Right, but that's a big one. Um, continued investment in AI companies, um, are going to need to establish the orchestration layer as a core capability. Um, that's gonna be built on what we think of as this commercial brain. So how do you organize and unleash the value of this proprietary customer data, uh, uh, that only you and your organization has access to and I think the ability to measure and fine tune the system based on value capture that Samara was talking about earlier, um, that'll continue to be really important.

Speaker C: Yeah, that was one of the things that really impressed me was that idea of it building out and mapping out a whole journey, everything of a campaign from, you know, initial in the door to transition to sales, to transition to customer service and leveraging that same data the whole way through that. How do you guys see that making is it going to come to the point where there are individuals that are specializing in that whole stretch of the journey or does it still have to remain segmented by the actual org chart?

Speaker A: So I think it's both organizations will still need to, will still be leveraging the data and technology to be able to optimize within each of those. And they should. Right, because we can get to greater precision. But the real exciting part is to be able to look at all those different spend across all those different channels and to now optimize to Ian's point, Ian's point to the customer journey, to the individual customer journey, which in the past was very difficult to do. Now, by being able to connect that across, you can look at a total customer investment versus looking at marketing investment, shopper, marketing investment, pricing investment, et cetera, and you get a true. Because absent that, the ROI on each of those individuals was inflated because it did not kind of, uh, take into account the effect of other commercial investments along that journey. So the exciting part is we can get a true understanding of the total customer investment. We can optimize it for where in the journey we want to have the most impact. And we can do that in a very deliberate way, which is so exciting.

Speaker B: I guess. The other thing I might add, John, just Samrat's comment comments sort of remind me of something. The next six months, I think what we're going to see is we are going to see leaders emerge. We've published some interesting research already on just AI value capture, and we've seen a small minority emerge so far. And this is a group of 5 to 10% of the customers in the market are really starting to capture pretty significant value from AI. They're capturing it in terms of elevated growth rates, they're capturing it in terms of productivity. It's flowing to the bottom line, but it's really an early minority. I think over the next six months we are going to see some really inspiring examples emerge of companies that have moved the needle, are really establishing new sources of competitive advantage. And I think it pushes the entire market forward. I mean, in every sector that you can think about, in every buying experience that you have as a consumer, we are going to start to see AI showing up in a way that creates meaningful value for the customer. And I think that's going to continue to drive in our space a lot of momentum for the rest of the pack to really sort of say, we've got to accelerate our own journey because we can't afford to be left behind.

Speaker A: The other piece from a. Sorry, I'm going to build on what the other piece, I think, which we will Also start to see is see the customer leaders are at the front end. The expectation of customer commercial leaders is to operate at the pace that their customers and consumers are moving at, which will always be faster than what the organization is going to move at. So you will actually start to see, as these exemplars emerge, the rest of the value chain having to kind of, from both from a technology and from a business process perspective, start to actually try to catch up and, and meet the innovation and the pace at which the front office is gonna start to move. Because for you to be able. For companies to be able to deliver that elevated customer experience or consumer experience that their end consumer customer expects of them, they will need the entire value chain to operate at that pace.

Speaker C: Yeah, I agree that we're finally at a point where an org can move and adapt at that speed. This has been great. We've got to be mindful of everybody's time here. But I do want to get. Before we go out the door, as always, uh, if you could just give us a plug for something you've caught in the last week or month as far as entertainment, music, books, movies, anything. Ian, have you got anything for us?

Speaker B: I'll give you two things. So, one, I just finished. I've got three daughters. Uh, I just finished reading a book called Culpability. Uh, so it's a novel, but the core sort of frame premise is based on the impact that AI is having on our lives. Like, it was a great read. Um, my wife recommended it. She was right. So I recommend that to anybody that's looking for a good book. And the other one is, you know, I recently, uh, have been, like, incredibly, you know, sort of impressed by the ability to interact with your, with your vehicle through, like, voice commands and AI assistance. And just thinking about in our daily lives, how AI is starting to, like, fundamentally change the, you know, aspects of the way we live. I think it's super interesting just to be aware of that and look for how it's showing up in our everyday lives.

Speaker C: That sounds good. Samrat for you?

Speaker A: Yes. For me, the two things which I think really have stood out for me. One is, uh, so my daughter, she's 16, uh, she teaches at Kumon, and, you know, she's an enterprising phenomenal young girl. Uh, she came to me, she's like, hey, I want to start investing my money, right? And this small pot, like maybe a couple of thousand bucks over the past year or something. And she said, all right, I'm going to go into these LLMs and I'm going to kind of ask them for recommendations, et cetera. So I got a note from my financial advisor who was working with her. Huh. Saying, hey, it's been a month. I just thought, I'll send you. He said, the market performed at 15.1%. She delivered 3.39.5%. So, one, it's a story. It's a learning for all of us. Like, hey, when you use technology and AI to kind of augment what you do, good things happen, right? So that's a great thing. But the second part of that is, I think nothing kind of replaces the ability to connect with each other, be with each other, just pick up the phone, talk to each other, etc. And quite honestly, that is what we live for. And so, yes, we will have a lot of exciting technology, a lot of exciting kind of innovation that's coming. But at the end of the day, being able to be out on the field, kind of play soccer with your kids or go and, you know, grab a drink with your friends will never get old.

Speaker C: That sounds great. That's a great place to end. Yeah, we'll have to wait for that mutual fund to open up. Maybe we can all retire a little faster based on that. Um, but that. That's great. Uh, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate you having on board.

Speaker A: Thank you, John.

Speaker B: Thanks, John.

Speaker C: Thanks. That'll do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee.

Speaker B: You've been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs@christopherspenn.com Read more from John J. Wall at ah.jw5150.com the marketing over Coffee theme song is called Mellow G by Fox Masters. And you can find it at Musically from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.