What if the most damaging phrase in your marketing isn’t a four-letter word, but three simple ones: “Do Not Reply”?
Agility requires more than just moving fast; it requires breaking down the walls between departments to respond to customer needs in the moment they happen. It’s about empowering every part of the organization to act as one cohesive brand, turning every interaction into a meaningful conversation.
Today, we’re going to talk about the end of an era: of one-way, impersonal, “do not reply” marketing. We’ll explore the shift from siloed campaigns to unified, real-time conversations, and what it takes to empower every single employee, from sales to service, to be an extension of the marketing team to build trust and drive growth.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Bobby Jania, CMO Marketing Cloud at Salesforce.
About Bobby Jania
Bobby Jania is an experienced marketing professional currently serving as CMO of Marketing Cloud at Salesforce since June 2014, where a focus on building personalized customer journeys has been paramount. Prior to Salesforce, Bobby held multiple strategic roles at Responsys, emphasizing the importance of integrated digital marketing strategies, and spent nearly a decade at Cypress Semiconductor, where responsibilities included leading innovations in programmable system-on-chip solutions and managing global marketing efforts. Bobby’s career began with a role as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which laid the groundwork for a passion for technology and marketing. Bobby holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the same institution.
Bobby Jania on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbyjania/
Resources
Salesforce : https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
What if the most damaging phrase in your marketing isn’t a four-letter word, but three simple ones? Do not reply. Agility requires more than just moving fast. It requires breaking down the walls between departments to respond to customer needs in the moment they happen. It’s about empowering every part of the organization to act as one cohesive brand, turning every interaction into a meaningful conversation. Today, we’re going to talk about the end of an era of one-way, impersonal, do-not-reply marketing.
We’ll explore the shift from siloed campaigns to unified real-time conversations and what it takes to empower every single employee from sales to service to be an extension of the marketing team to build trust and drive growth. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Bobby Jania CMO Marketing Cloud at Salesforce. Bobby, welcome to the show. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Salesforce?
Bobby Jania (00:48)
Thank you for having me. I lead all things marketing at Marketing Cloud. I’ve been at Salesforce now for somehow over 11 years and I’ve been in the digital marketing space for coming up in 15 years. Started off as a computer engineer, made a weird turn somewhere and got myself into product marketing, but definitely happy I made my way over here.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:16)
Yeah, nice. Well, yeah. So let’s let’s dive in here and we’re going to talk about a few things today. But I want to start with this from the strategic level and this this shift from thinking about things in terms of campaigns to think about things in terms of conversations. so in a recent article that you wrote, you declared the end of ⁓ no reply marketing beyond it just being a poor customer experience. What are some of the deeper business and brand implications of this kind of one way campaign centric mindset that you think leaders often miss.
Bobby Jania (01:50)
Yeah, I mean, Greg, if you think about it, the do not reply address is perhaps the most damaging artifact of the legacy digital era. You know, we often critique it as poor customer experience and it is because, know, a deeper business implication is that, you know, it represents like a deliberate blindness. We’re just kind of putting our hand in the way saying, you know, no, we don’t want to talk to you. And this modern data economy where, you know, we want to have that customer response and it’s the highest fidelity signal available. Like the fact that we just
find out, don’t ignore it, but say, don’t even send it to us. It’s kind of crazy. So when a brand sends an email from a no reply address, they’re effectively telling their customer, we want your money, but we don’t want your voice. And you think about this from a business perspective, this is pretty catastrophic. And there’s kind of three primary reasons. First, it really serves as a feedback loop required to train the AI. If you think about the value of the data we can get from the customer sending information directly to that brand and how that could be used to train AI.
If you block that inbound signal, then your data models are going to remain static. And honestly, they’re going to eventually decay. Second, it creates brand debt. Every time a customer sees the no reply, there’s a micro fraction that forms in their trust. And over time, this is going to start to train customers to ignore that brand entirely. So this is really why we’re seeing this shift with Agent 4 and this transition from campaigns, which are really episodic and one way blasts to conversations, which are continuous and they’re bi-directional and they’re adaptive.
A campaign has an end date, but a relationship doesn’t. And so by utilizing these autonomous agents to manage inbound replies, we’re finally able to scale listening in the same way that we scaled broadcasting. And so suddenly we are turning the do not reply dead end into a please reply revenue channel.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:37)
Yeah. And so you mentioned ⁓ agent force. I want to talk a little bit about, ⁓ you recently introduced this concept of agent force marketing where every employee is empowered to be a marketer. So this is a ⁓ significant cultural and operational shift. How does a CMO even begin to champion this idea internally, especially when speaking to heads of sales or service who have their own distinct KPIs.
Bobby Jania (04:08)
absolutely. And championing this shift really requires all of us to reframe what work is and like what work we’re actually asking AI to do. I think the biggest fear in any organization is that AI is here to replace people. And as a leader, I think you have to tackle that head on and that we aren’t asking AI to replace our best humans. What we’re asking to do is do the work our humans physically cannot do. And I think that’s kind of the key piece here. The strategy here is to find your impossible backlogs, if you will.
So let me give you a transparent example of what this has meant for Salesforce as we view ourselves as customer zero and we’ve done all of this rollout. So we identified a ton of massive inefficiencies over the last 26 years. As an example, we had accumulated over 100 million inbound prospects. These were orphan leads that no human SDR could ever call back. We simply just didn’t have enough hours in the day to call these people. They were at a score that was low enough that they may have raised their hand and said, please call me.
But we still just didn’t have the human capital to go and do that. So we deployed our agent force SDR to tackle this long tail. Now I want to be clear. This agent did not start out perfectly, right? Initially we had a high rate of, don’t know, and the answers, but the agent has infinite patients and it worked through 8,000 of those dormant leads in the first three weeks. the result was $500,000 in pipeline that would have otherwise been zero. It wasn’t magic. It was just math.
Right? And this is how you can empower your org where you don’t swap humans for robots. You give your humans a partner that never sleeps to handle this backlog that they could never touch.
Greg Kihlstrom (05:49)
Yeah, yeah. And of course, that backlog and kind of the quality of leads is really dependent on data, right. And on on good data and unified data. Right. So, you know, the the the vision of a unified, responsive brand hinges on that single source of truth that I know, you know, many talk about, but ⁓ fewer achieve. We’ll just we’ll just put it that way. So, in your experience, what’s the most common roadblock that large organizations face when they’re trying to unify their data? And maybe what’s the first practical step to overcoming it?
Bobby Jania (06:30)
would say the most common roadblock is actually the physics of data gravity. And for over 20 years, the industry best practice has always been build this central data lake and put all of your data into it, try to copy everything into it. And the reality is, is that by the time you finish that migration project, the scheme has changed again, the market has moved, and the data is then stale. And it’s just an endless game of catch up. So most organizations are just drowning in unstructured data.
PDFs, emails, call transcripts, Slack messages, and the traditional database wasn’t built for these. It was built to handle rows and columns, and they fail at capturing the nuance of these customer conversations. So the practical step forward is this fundamental architecture shift, which is just stop moving the data. And so at Salesforce, we’ve really tried to champion this with our zero copy framework within Data360. And this is where we connect to where the data lives whether that’s in Snowflake, Databricks, or a legacy ERP, the fact is that we’re eliminating this idea of data drift and the staleness of traditional ingestion. And this allows us to have both federation, but federation with intelligence. But then we go a step further with Agent Force. So now we can use context indexing to ground our agents with not just structured fields like last purchase date, but also with unstructured context, like why did they return this item?
This allows the agent to reason with the full picture of the customer in mind. And this first practical step is to audit your data strategy, right? So how are you trying to move your data? Who are you trying to connect it to? And then the latter is the only path to agility.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:16)
And then of course, with the data foundation in place, and I think this is where a lot of organizations are also getting stuck, you know, beyond even the unified view of the data to have great performance with AI, you know, it’s garbage in, garbage out, right? So, you know, once the data is in place, then, you know, AI is that engine that makes it actionable and often in real time. Could you maybe give us a tangible example of how AI helps service agents, for instance, have a marketing conversation without needing to be a marketing expert.
Bobby Jania (08:50)
I think Fisher and Peichel is a perfect example of a brand that does just this. Because they don’t just sell appliances, they sell a luxury lifestyle. And for a brand like that, the contact center is a high stakes environment. Every conversation either builds the brand or it breaks it. And traditionally, that’s where the conflict is. Operational leaders hate it when you ask service agents to market or to upsell because it slows them down and hurts their average handle times or A.H.T.
They are then forced to choose between efficiency and experience. But Agent Force removes that trade-off. Because the agent already knows the customer was browsing a 36-inch range on the website, it instantly serves that context to the service agent. The agent doesn’t have to spend five minutes digging around for the next best action. It’s just right there. And this allowed Fisher and Pichel to drive a 33 % increase in conversion without slowing down the resolution. So it turns the service center from a cost center to a revenue driver without forcing agents to act like aggressive salespeople.
Greg Kihlstrom (09:53)
Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s great. And so building on that and talking a little bit more about measurement shifting from this again, this campaign mindset and campaign open rates to the success of real time and much to the example you just gave cross departmental conversations. Old school marketing dashboards are sometimes less relevant because we’re telling a different story, right?
What new set of KPIs should leaders be looking at to measure the impact of this more relationship focused approach?
Bobby Jania (10:29)
Yeah, there’s definitely going to be an end to some of our vanity metrics that we’re really used to, know, open rates and click through rates. I’d to tell you that someone was loud, but they don’t really tell you that you were effective. And so when you think about deploying an agent, you’re managing a workflow, not a broadcast. So therefore we really need to have metrics that evolve to measure both now performance and also now trust. So we look at three layers of the new KPIs. The first is really outcome metrics. So instead of email opens, we’re looking at meetings booked or problems resolved. So for our SDR agent, the primary metric isn’t volume, it’s that 500K in pipeline that we mentioned earlier. The second is conversational quality. So, you know, we normally track like, I don’t know rate from, you know, the first launch of our agents. And, you know, we had to admit that the ignorance was pretty bad at first with about 30 % of the time. Though through reinforcement and through that learning and better context and better indexing, we drove that where the agent said, I don’t know from 30 %
down to under 10%. And we continue to get a lower, I don’t know rate, signifies that higher trusted conversation. you’re getting that, value is, exchange is happening because the customer is getting what they want from the agent then. And then the last I think is a metric that we’ve all talked about forever. And that’s just customer lifetime value. So ultimately we’re shifting from campaigns to conversations. And a campaign again is time bound and a conversation is part of a relationship.
which hopefully doesn’t have the same defined end date. So the proof in the longevity is really, we building a relationship? And if we’re building a relationship, hopefully we have customer lifetime value. So then does an agent assist the customer? If they do that, does that customer buy more often? Do they have less churn? Are we seeing AEs use SDR agents in a way to achieve higher order values because their leads are potentially better qualified before they are ever even touched by a human? So I think that this metric is going to be in the marketer toolkit for a while, but it’s going to really become important in the future.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:32)
Yeah, yeah. And even if we’re unifying data and tying all of these things together with agents, still many of us still live in that world of siloed departments and teams and everything like that. And so, you know, it’s important that there’s attribution and things like that. How do you effectively tie the success of, say, a service agent acting on a marketing insight back to that marketing teams overall contributions or revenue, customer lifetime value. Like how does that relationship work in this scenario?
Bobby Jania (13:04)
Yeah, absolutely. think attrition has been the third rail of marketing politics for a while. The solution in my mind lies in democratizing the data visibility, right? And like, how does everyone see the same data be working off the same data? And so with Agent Force 360, we introduced this idea of shared marketing intelligence. And this allows us to visualize the performance data and the attribution models directly in the flow of work and specifically actually from inside of Slack. So this means that we can track the lineage of the deal if a service agent uses the next best action that’s recommended by marketing cloud to cross sell a product, then that’s a revenue event that’s tagged. And we can visualize this instantly. It stops being about marketing claiming credit for sales’s work and starts being about our actual organizational attribution. So when a service leader can look at a dashboard, you can see that 20 % of their teams upsells were driven by marketing intelligence, the dynamic starts to change.
They stop viewing marketing as a cost center and start viewing it as a strategic partner that makes their team smarter. And this is where the technology can enforce collaboration.
Greg Kihlstrom (14:13)
Yeah. And so for those CMOs or marketing team members sitting out there, you know, one question may come to mind here. You know, if every customer facing employee now, you know, quote unquote, becomes a marketer, what does that mean for the marketing department itself? You know, how does the role of the traditional brand or campaign manager evolve in this this new world of collaboration that you’re describing?
Bobby Jania (14:41)
Yeah, I this is an existential question. I said this one time in a keynote to make everyone at your company a marketer. And one of the marketers in the audience came up to me and was like, please, please don’t say that. Please don’t do that. Like we don’t want to do that. Right. And I mean, I get it. But at the same time, like there’s this concept of everyone’s a marketer, no one’s a marketer. Well, the reality is it’s a little different. And the answer is that the marketing department evolves from being a factory of content to really being an architect of the brand.
And so in this campaign centric world, know, 80 % of a marketer’s time is spent on the assembly lines, building the list, coding the HTML, checking the links, managing all the approvals. This is low value, high effort work. And agent force automates the assembly. The agents can build the campaign, optimize the segments and execute the sentence based on the creative brief. This liberates the marketer to focus on the why and the what. So the marketer becomes the brand governor. Their job is to define the strategy, the voice guardrails and to create the soul of the brand. They set the rules of engagement for the agents and this elevates the profession. We stop being button pushers and we start being market makers. We move from executors to orchestrators.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:52)
Yeah. And I mean, I love that because it elevates the role of humans, but it also elevates the role of the marketer. Right. In this in this world, you to your point, if if if we’ve democratized parts of this now, the the most elevated part of that now belongs to continues to belong to the marketers, let’s say in this scenario, what do you say is the biggest skill or maybe even mindset shift that marketing leaders need to adopt to
not only lead their brands away from the do not reply marketing that we talked about earlier, but also this shift to marketers being more architects than doing the busy work.
Bobby Jania (16:36)
Yeah, I think the hardest shift is going to be that we all have to let go of the illusion of control. And I intentionally say the illusion of control, but what we’re going to gain is the reality of scale. So marketers, myself included, we are trained to be perfectionists, to approve every pixel, make sure every little piece is lined up perfectly. But you can’t approve every single interaction when you have agents having millions of concurrent conversations. And the other reality is the marketer is not in control today the customer is. like already thinking we’re in control is just false from the get-go. So the mindset shift needs to be go from governance over micromanage. You have to learn to trust the system you’ve built. This means investing in time, it means having a trust layer, means defining the ethical boundaries, the tone guidelines, and the data access rules. Once you set those guardrails, you have to let the agents run is the shift from being managing the player to managing the game. And it’s going to feel risky at first, but it’s the only way we can achieve the true agility at the speed of the modern consumer.
Greg Kihlstrom (17:45)
Yeah, well, a couple last things as we wrap up here. First thing, ⁓ if we were having this interview one year from now, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
Bobby Jania (17:57)
So I think it’s going to be this idea of the agent to agent economy. And it kind of sounds a little like science fiction today. But the infrastructure is being built for all of this right now. Today, we build agents to talk to humans. And if you kind of think about that, the next step, all of us as consumers, probably going to have our own agents. And you’re going to see this idea of the rise of the consumer agent, personal bots. So in 2016, the question won’t just be, how does my brand talk to you? But how does my brand agent negotiate with your personal agent. And if your personal bot wants to reorder coffee or negotiate a software renewal, my bot needs to be able to speak in that protocol. And so I think we’re preparing for a world where your website traffic is half human and half agents. I think of it kind of like the early days of SEO. We used to optimize for human eyeballs. Soon we started optimizing for agent logic. ⁓ This shift is going to be coming faster than people realize.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:53)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would love to talk about that a year from now with you and definitely have a lot of, there’s, there’s a lot of implications on branding as well as marketing in that, in that scenario. So definitely would love to talk about that. Well, Bobby, thanks so much for joining today. I got one last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Bobby Jania (19:15)
I try to stay as close to the customer as possible. I’m sitting here right now in Salesforce tower in San Francisco. I joke around that I literally sit in an ivory tower. And so for me, it’s how do I make sure I don’t get trapped in boardroom? How do I make sure I don’t get trapped looking at spreadsheets that can sometimes mask the reality? And so I love getting the front lines, not just from taking calls with customers and meetings, but sitting down with our SDRs and listening to them take the phone calls, looking through transcripts of what’s happened with service agents.
Even going through, we launched one of our first two-way email campaigns. I was going through all the emails to see what did customers actually say back to us. So I just feel the closer I could stay to our customers, ⁓ the closer I know to what’s going on.
