Mike Boyle: Well, this podcast is called Salesforce Simplified, and I would be remiss if I didn’t just bring up what you were talking about with AI agents, which, you know, in the Salesforce world, there’s a, you know, new product out there that’s called Agent Force, and that’s exactly what it’s all about. AI agents. And it’s, you know, gonna be all the rage, as they say.

Paul Slack: If you don’t mind, I just want to jump in and touch on what you just said real quick because that, I think, is a very important trend. I’m glad to see that Salesforce is doing it. You know, AI has lived for the most part outside, as a separate thing. So I have to go to ChatGPT or Claude or any of these other AI tools to interact with it. I think it’s a brilliant move by these tools that your team is in every single day to actually embed the AI inside of the foundational, fundamental tool. And so I think that’s just going to make our lives better. So I’m glad to see Salesforce did that.

Mike Boyle: Yeah. And, we, recently, might m as well, you know, plug it. We recently wrote a blog about the Salesforce Agent Force on the Ad Victoriam Salesforce Blog. You can just go to AdVic.com – a-d-v-i-c.com and pull that up if you’d like to learn a little bit more about Salesforce Agentforce. Alrighty. So LMOs and AI that’s, on the docket for 2025? Oh, yeah. Very cool. In terms of B2B marketing trends, let’s switch our hats and talk about something that’s also near and dear, or should be near and dear to all marketers. Their ability to leverage CRMs. Paul, talk to me about what you think the biggest challenge marketers face when it comes to effectively using a CRM system and how poor data management can actually contribute to that.

Paul Slack: Yeah, that’s a big one. Especially when you just to kind of piggyback onto the whole AI component. You know, if we are going to be successful in getting maximum value out of our CRMs, we’ve got to have good data and it needs to be unified data. And so I can’t remember the article. If I find it, I’ll send it to you, Mike, and you can throw it in the show notes, but it was an article that I read that said the average B2B business has 14 different systems, or tech if you will, to manage the customer life cycle. Can you imagine that? 14 different software tools to manage a customer life cycle in their business. And so not only do we have departmental silos like sales and customer success and marketing, sometimes working in silos, sometimes not in the same systems, but on top of that, we’ve got these different tools that we’re using to manage a customer life cycle. And that’s just gotta change. And the future of CRM really, and we’ve never been in a position like we are today to really take advantage of this, but just to improve our data management and to have all of us kind of singing from the same hymn book and having one version of the truth. And it’s so important because when you think about it, you know, think about the relationship between sales and marketing for a second. You know, sales wants leads, right? But they don’t want to do the work to keep contact records up to date so that marketers can go in and segment the database so that they can run really hyper-targeted segmented campaigns. But then sales will complain because marketing sending them low-quality leads. Well, a huge part of that is just data hygiene and making sure that we’re all working in the same system. And so when we don’t have good data management, it just makes it really hard to predict, you know, what customers should we go after, how should we segment them? You know, you end up with emails like you were talking about at the beginning of the podcast, Mike, where they’re not very personalized. They try to be personalized, but they’re really not that personalized. And so if we want to, you know, one of the biggest challenges I think we have is just getting all the data in the same place and getting it accurate and complete and getting everybody on board with good data hygiene.

Mike Boyle: Well, I think another important part of this obviously has to be having a clear strategy with, that said, tell me about some of the risks or missed opportunities where marketers kind of run into trouble.

Paul Slack: One of the challenges, Mike, is that in so many ways we work with a lot of B2B companies big and small. And so I’m not trying to pick on anybody here, but you know, they go and get a customer relationship management system and I’m really going to date myself here. They treat it like a Rolodex, right? It’s like, hey, this is my customer record and this is where they work and this is you know, their address and you know, and they’re not connecting the dots between, you know, what is our business really trying to accomplish? And then how can unified departments, you know, a revenue team, what we like to call them, sales and marketing and customer success, really align behind where the company’s trying to grow and then leverage CRM as a tool to get you there? Because without a cohesive strategy, you know, it goes back to departments working in silos and having fragmented data. And when you don’t have, everything in one place, you’re not seeing the big picture. And then ultimately you’re not able to manage up very well and show that the work that you’re doing inside of CRM or even in your department is really helping the company achieve the goals that it’s trying to achieve.

Mike Boyle: You know, Paul, one of the things that is very top of mind with us here at Ad Victoriam Solutions and we help our clients with day in and day out happily is adoption. It’s a big problem in many, many companies, and in particular overcomplicated workflows are often cited as a reason for low CRM adoption. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways marketers can simplify their CRM process to boost efficiency and user adoption?

Paul Slack: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of the things that’s going to help with all this, even the last question that you brought up, it’s really got to be a top-down focus. Like, and I’m sure you guys see this in your business, Mike if you can get the C-Suite on board with how the CRM is going to help you achieve your objectives and give them the business intelligence that they’re looking for so that they can make really good informed decisions about where the business is going, that’s going to help a lot. And so tying that to overcomplicated workflows. You know, the thing about CRM, the good news and bad news about CRM is you can, you can almost do, you can do just about anything you want to do inside of a CRM as it, you know because it is like automation, it does things for you. And so that’s really the biggest challenge. I feel like most, I’m going to talk from a marketing perspective here, Mike, but they’re like kids in a candy store. They’re like, oh my gosh, I can do this and I can do that. And just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Right? And so the first thing you need to think about when it comes to overcomplicated workflows is, you know, stop trying to do too much. You know, really focus on building what we call an MVP system. And we can get into that in a little bit if you want. where you just start with what are the core things we need to accomplish that is going to help us as these departments that are working inside of CRM really help the business achieve its overall objectives. And I’m sure you guys see this all the time, Mike, but when we pull up the hood on a CRM and we start, we hear this, oh my gosh, it’s too complicated and nobody knows how to use it. You got to be a brain surgeon. You know, we get under the hood and what we find are, you know, they’ve built automations to fix automations and it’s like, holy cow, it looks like a bowl of spaghetti in there. And it’s really going to ultimately hurt your business. It’s way better to start with an MVP deployment and then slowly add automations over time. As you’ve kind of built the foundation, got that humming along now you want to, you know, try something new. I do believe you need to have a Rev Ops kind of traffic cop if you will. That really challenges every automation, every new thing you want to work into your CRM so that it’s just not a, oh, just because we can, let’s do it. You really need somebody that’s going to go well. Is that really the right thing to do right now?

Mike Boyle: Well, that actually leads me into my next question. You know, you’ve previously spoken about the need for a holistic enterprise-wide approach to CRM implementation. How does this differ from a more fragmented approach and what benefits does it bring to marketing teams specifically?

Paul Slack: You know, it just really goes down to one version of the truth. When you’ve got everybody playing off of one version of the truth, it becomes the central nervous system for, you know, your marketing work, your sales work, and your customer Service work. You’re not, you know, doing this little bit like pipeline is in Salesforce and you know, your, your email marketing is done in some other tool and Customer Service is using, you know, some other tool to manage trouble tickets or whatever. You want it all in one place and you want that because you want be able to see and understand the buyer journey. Can you imagine, and I’m sure we all have experienced this, how hard it would be to truly understand the buyer journey from, you know, they entered our system over here on the far left, and now they’re an evangelist telling everybody in the world how great we are. If that information is broken up between 14 different tools, if all that information is in one place, now all of a sudden we can see everything that that buyer or customer really is doing with our business. It gives us a true ability to monitor what those customer interactions look like. And so imagine having, you know, better lead handoffs, imagine having better sales handoffs to Customer Service. Imagine having better reporting. All of those things happen when we’ve got a holistic approach versus a siloed approach.

Mike Boyle: I want to just, go back and talk about strategy here for just a moment. We talked about the importance earlier of making sure that your company has a CRM strategy. Okay, we’ve got one in place now. How can marketers ensure that their CRM strategy is aligned with, you know, the broader business goals and processes, and especially when it comes to lead nurturing and customer engagement?

Paul Slack: Yeah, that’s really great. So it kind of goes back to something I mentioned earlier, and that is man, I can’t tell you how important it is to have C-Suite buy-off or buy-in, if you will, in what you’re trying to do. And if you can get the C-Suite leveraging the tool, looking at the data, using it, supporting it in meetings and things like that, that’s really key. Another thing is aligning the CRM objectives with the business metrics. So you understand the business is trying to grow this many new accounts or grow our, reoccurring revenue by this amount, whatever those metrics are. Build dashboards inside of the system that are going to measure those things. And Mike, if you think about it in terms of CRM alignment, if you’re really going to be committed and transparent about, hey, we’re going to connect the dots between what our CRM is doing and the business objectives. And we’re going to build dashboards to show that we’re doing it. It’s going to force us to have good, clean data because you’re not going to be able to populate those dashboards if you’ve got inaccurate or incomplete data. And so, you know, build that CRM objectives with the business metrics that matter and then use those reports in your meetings. I can’t tell you how often, you know, I’m talking to a business and they’ve built dashboards. But maybe the marketing team is the only one that’s looking at them, or maybe the sales team is the only one that’s looking at them. What we recommend is that these dashboards and reports that are coming out of your CRM are used in the business meetings to show that we are achieving the objectives that we’re trying to achieve. And when we do that, it kind of forces CRM alignment. Right, because what’s that old saying, Mike? It’s like what gets measured, gets managed. Right. And so if we’re doing a good job of, you know, not hiding behind the scenes and saying, hey, this is my little personal dashboard that’s showing me how many MQLs are becoming SQLs, but rather using the data that’s in our CRM to feed up all the way to leadership, all of a sudden you’ve got really quick alignment. Does that make sense?

Mike Boyle: Absolutely. One of the terms that we use in our business, both of our businesses if you will, is the term customer journey. We talk about that a lot. And the role that, you know, mapping out a really good succinct customer journey, how important that is. Talk about that in terms of a CRM, mapping out one within a CRM and how effective it is with lead nurturing strategy, and maybe even give us an example of how that has transformed a company’s marketing success.

Paul Slack: Yeah, that’s a great question, Mike. You know, there’s a couple of components to that. One is, you know, we’ve talked, touched on a lot of it. You know, having unified data, having everybody operating out of the same system gives us the ability to do customer journey mapping. And, you know, I’m going to go all the way to the beginning of our, podcast today where we talked about some of the biggest trends and how I’m really excited to see businesses understanding that from a marketing perspective, our job isn’t to go sell people with direct response messaging, but rather understand that our buyers are in control of their journey. They’re not talking to sales until the very last minute. And so we need to be able to start thinking about understanding their, not, not our marketing funnels, but really their journey from they don’t know that you exist to they now know that you exist, they’re now considering you and understanding the problems that you can solve for them. And now they’re evaluating you, and now they’re buying from you. And then understanding what are the information requirements that my buyer needs at each of those stages. And then what formats of information are they looking for and where are they going to consume that information so that we can make sure that wherever they are in their journey, from unaware to aware to buying, that we are meeting them where they are, which may be on our website, it may be in social media, it may be in other places, it may be in an email from a Sales rep, it really doesn’t matter. But when we understand where they are in the journey and we’re seeing that through signals that CRM is able to capture, then we’re going to be able to serve them way, way better. And that’s the key. It’s like when we do customer journey mapping, it should all be about the customer, not about winning more business. We will win more business when we do a better job of meeting the information requirements that our customers have at each stage of their journey. And so the other benefits to that, Mike, are once we’ve got a good, clear customer journey map and we can see where they are based on the signals that they’re throwing off, then we can be super hyper-personalized. You know, I love that analogy that you used at the beginning where, you know, personalization isn’t, you know, hi Mike, podcast host of. You know, it’s not that at all. It’s like understanding this person that works for this company that is in this stage of the buying journey and needs this information that you’re able to deliver that to them in an automated way and they give them almost a choose-your-own-adventure experience. And that’s what customer journey mapping really, the promise of that really is for all of us as marketers. And so can you only imagine if you’re able to deliver exactly what that customer needs in the channel and the platform that they’re looking for it, what that’s going to do for your engagement, what it’s going to do for your lead quality and really just going to make buyers more ready to buy from you and you’re going to win more business, I believe, than, you know, your competition that’s still out there doing it the old school way.

Mike Boyle: Last question, Paul is actually, in two parts. You know, I envision that there are some folks out there listening that, that are going to fall into this category. And I’m looking for you to give them some advice. And the advice is for a marketer who feels overwhelmed by their current CRM system and if they’re overwhelmed, what should they start to think about in terms of optimizing or simplifying processes?

Paul Slack: You know, one of the first things I would recommend. So, you know, in my mind, I see two kinds of customers, ones that are, you know, in a complicated spaghetti-like CRM deployment and they’re like, oh my gosh, I’ve got automations for automations. And you know, you need rockets, a rocket scientist to come in here and figure this all out. My number one recommendation is start with an architect map. So if you can sit there and you know, design, like I mentioned earlier, you know, where do people enter our system? What are all the different ways that they can enter our system? What are all the stages that they’re going to go through, who touches them at what stage? And get that on paper, that’s going to help you very quickly understand what you need. Like it kind of goes back to that MVP thing that we were talking about. What are the core functions that our CRM needs to be able to do to serve that customer throughout that ArcMap? Then I would do a CRM reset and I would just simply declutter all the stuff that’s in there. I’d get rid of all the nonrelevant things and as much as you can get to a fresh start. Then I would simplify your workflows and really focus on the things that you need in order to get the core business functions down and focus on training your team and all the different departments on building really accurate customer data. So that, because a big part of this, we kind of talked about this at the beginning of what gets us here is we just don’t have very good data or it’s in multiple places or it’s fragmented, it’s incomplete. And so, you know, if you can start with that arc map and then do the reset and then make sure that you’ve trained your team so that all of your data is enriched and has the right information that you need, that’s a great first step. And then once a quarter I would just go in and look at, you know, how is my CRM performing? Are there new automations that we want to deploy and have that, you know, rev ops person or whoever’s going to be responsible for, you know, adding new automations into your system or workflows into your system really kind of be the, I call them the, not the yes man, but the no man. Right? Their first answer needs to be no, prove me wrong. That’s going to keep you from getting way too many automations or workflows going on. And then, you know, over the long term I would just focus on, you know, build a solid foundation and then grow incrementally over time. And I think that’s how you reset it because you know, it’s kind of hard to start with that big old bowl of spaghetti and tease out all the different pieces of all the different noodles if you will. But you know, focus with what your customer journey looks like. And then build the foundation that’s going to serve that. And then make sure you’ve got good data and then grow slowly over time. That’s really my best advice.

Mike Boyle: Solid advice… let me add. Paul, thank you so much for joining us today. I hope I’ve said this to you in the past. I hope you never get tired of me calling on you to talk about B2B marketing and adding this little twist, this year about CRMs, has been very helpful for folks. I’m very sure of that.

Paul Slack: Yeah, Mike, glad to be here and look forward to next year.

Mike Boyle: Absolutely. And, I just want to take a moment to remind everyone who is interested in B2B marketing to follow Paul Slack and Vende Digital on LinkedIn. Paul’s posts are invaluable. Every single day, even on weekends, I catch this guy posting valuable information. So I highly, highly recommend that you follow Paul and Vende Digital as well. I have links to all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about today and some great resources for you from Paul. Thank you for those, Paul. Absolutely. in this episode’s notes. And lastly, if you’d like to learn a little bit more about Paul and his team and what they do at Vende Digital, please visit vendedigital.com that’s V E N D E digital.com where you’ll also be able to contact Paul directly. So thanks again, Paul. Look forward to the next time.

Paul Slack: Absolutely.

Mike Boyle: And everyone, thanks so much for listening to this episode. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Victoriam Solutions. Our next episode is just around the corner.

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