It's easy to say you want your decisions to be data-driven. But as Salesforce CMO Ariel Kelman has learned, hard data doesn't tell the full story. Often, you also need to consider the qualitative.
"Let's say you go and do some executive event series, where you have 30 people come to each event," he says. "It's not like if we want to go draw conclusions from, let's say, Dreamforce, we had 45,000 people. You've got a lot of data to work with there."
Ariel previously led worldwide marketing for Amazon's cloud services business, AWS; his boss at the time, Andy Jassy, recommended that he call up a sampling of the participants in a niche program to determine its value to the company.
"Of the 300 people in this program over the year, we went and called up 20 of them and we got pretty consistent information: This part of what you're doing is super impactful to getting us to do more. This part [is] irrelevant, waste of time. This part, I don't care ... When there's areas of your business that you can't measure precisely, if you come up with three different imprecise, imperfect measurement techniques that are very different, then you can see it can actually end up being useful. If they're all aligning, your chances of them being statistically flawed in exactly the same way are pretty low."
Today on Building Better CMOs, Ariel talks with MMA Global CEO Greg Stuart about the transformative role of AI in modern marketing and Salesforce's innovative Agentforce platform. They also discuss prioritizing customer experience, the challenges of adopting deep learning models, and misconceptions in marketing measurement.