Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author with nearly 20 books on Martech and customer experience management. Greg shares fresh insights into how companies can leverage marketing technology and AI to bolster customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Whether you’re a C-suite executive or a marketing professional, this episode will equip you with actionable strategies to deliver exceptional, personalized customer experiences.
Here are three pivotal questions Greg answered during our interview:
- How can companies efficiently organize and access vast amounts of customer data for better decision-making?
- What are the common mistakes in Martech implementation, and how can businesses avoid them?
- How does AI enhance—rather than replace—human work to improve both customer and employee experiences and drive business outcomes?
About Greg Kihlström
Greg Kihlström is a best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur, and serves as an advisor and consultant to top companies on marketing technology, marketing operations, and digital transformation initiatives. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including Adidas, Coca-Cola, FedEx, HP, Marriott, Nationwide, Victoria’s Secret, and Toyota.
He is a multiple-time Co-Founder and C-level leader, leading his digital experience agency to be acquired in 2017, successfully exited an HR technology platform provider he co-founded in 2020, and led a SaaS startup to be acquired by a leading edge computing company in 2021. He currently advises and sits on the Board of a marketing technology startup.
He executive produces 5 business and marketing-related podcasts, including the award-winning The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström, now top 5 on Apple’s U.S. marketing charts and in its 6th year with over 500 episodes and millions of downloads, which discusses marketing technology and its role in the customer experience with some of the world’s leading experts and leaders.
Greg is a contributing writer to Forbes, MarTech, CustomerThink, and CMSWire, and has been featured in publications such as Advertising Age, Business Insider, Financial Times, and The Washington Post. Greg has been named #1 on its list of the Top Global Marketing Thought Leaders by Thinkers 360, was named one of ICMI’s Top 25 CX Thought Leaders two years in a row, and a DC Inno 50 on Fire as a DC trendsetter in Marketing. He’s also participated as a speaker at global industry events and has guest lectured at prominent universities and colleges.
Resources
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Mark Slatin:
Well, I am so excited to invite back to the show, my friend, Greg Kihlstrom, who is a best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur, and serves as an advisor and consultant to top companies on marketing technology, marketing operations, and digital transformation initiatives. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including Adidas, Coca-Cola, FedEx, HP, Marriott, and Nationwide. Greg, welcome to the show.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Good to be back. Good to see you again.
Mark Slatin: Great to see you, Greg. And full disclosure, Greg and I have partnered up. I have joined his Agile podcast network. And I guess it’s been somewhere around six months. And I’m part of a group of other podcasts that Greg oversees. And thanks for including me in that, by the way, Greg.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, of course. Yeah, it’s been been a great ride so far. So yeah.
Mark Slatin: Absolutely. Okay, so Greg and I go way back. But Greg has been on the show. And what he has an unimaginable amount of energy is Greg, how many books have you written now?
Greg Kihlstrom: I kind of lost track. So it’s it’s somewhere approaching 20.
Mark Slatin: But yeah, approaching 20 books. Okay. So what I’m really excited about to dig into today is an area that I know is sort of in your sweet spot, which is marketing technology or mar tech. And in particular, the intersection between MarTech and customer experience management. And I know that you have experience in CX as well. But you’re kind of your make sure I’m getting this right. Your roots are really in marketing, right?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And you know, there’s certainly some overlap. And I know we’ll talk about it. But really, I yeah, marketing is kind of the sweet spot.
Mark Slatin: Okay, so the world is filled with acronyms and words that have different meanings, such as customer experience, which means an awful lot to a lot of different people. And I am sure that marketing technology or MarTech has been misconstrued or thought of many different ways. So let’s level set for our audience here. When we say MarTech, what do we actually mean?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s and it’s and it’s a pretty broad category as well. There anyone familiar with the like Martek loom escape? There’s I lost track. There’s many thousands of platforms that call themselves Martek. But really, you know what, at the end of the day, what it is, it’s, marketing platforms that do really, from soup to nuts, it’s collecting data and information about customers, it’s delivering marketing campaigns and experiences to customers, and then it’s analyzing those campaigns and initiatives. So everything from data collection to analytics, and everything in between. And that’s why Martech is a very big, it’s a very big place to be. So you know, a lot of times you’ll find people focused on one niche of it, you know, e commerce is just one narrow niche of of MarTech and stuff like that. So, you know, I try to I try to focus on, you know, the, the strategic parts of it and the process oriented parts of it, because I mean, no, nobody can know all the ins and outs of all of it. But again, at its, you know, fundamental level, it’s really it’s, it’s focused on the those, you know, basically data delivery and analysis.
Mark Slatin: So let me double click on that a little bit if I can. You mentioned that the word platform and it brought up something for me in the course that I teach at Michigan State, it’s customer relationship management. And right off the bat, people think of salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics or some software platform that manages sales pipelines. or contact management. And of course, the course is much more than that. It’s sort of the end-to-end understanding of the customer lifecycle and how you can use automation strategically and first think through the strategy and then apply it to earn loyalty and trust from customers so that you can improve business outcomes. So when I say that, it feels to me like there might be a parallel So I want to get a distinction for the audience when we say platform, is platform really just a component of it?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, you know, there’s there’s the the software itself. And then there’s the use, you know, there’s, it’s, it comes down to people process, I add data to the, you know, people process data platform. So platform at its most simplistic is literally the software and the code that that runs it. But you could also look at platform as the people in the processes that are using it, right. So in the Salesforce example, Yeah, you have a subscription, but it takes a lot more than a subscription to a piece of software to really make Salesforce run. You’ve got to have processes that guide the people that are using it. I would say the same goes for Martek. You can have a customer data platform that is a thing that you pay a subscription for, but in the broader sense, you need a way to collect customer data, you need a way to understand who your customers are, and then you need to do something with that data. So that could be one piece of software with some people using it, or it could be a collection of different pieces tied together.
Mark Slatin: Okay. All right. And then for us, could you draw the distinction or the connection, the interrelationship between MarTech and customer experience management?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, definitely. And, you know, I think the lines do get blurred sometimes. And sometimes I think that’s a good thing. And sometimes I think it’s just confusing. It’s kind of, again, to go back to the Salesforce analogy, it’s like, there are salespeople using a CRM, but there’s also marketing people that are, you know, sending marketing emails and all that stuff using that, that same CRM. So it does get a little, a little blurry sometimes. But, you know, I think where things are headed is, marketing and CX technologies being used a lot more in parallel and a lot more synonymous with one another. I think this gets back to the benefits of being able to react and make a better customer experience in real time versus purely lagging indicators like surveys and all those kinds of things. I think, to me, the exciting parts about where marketing and CX kind of collide in a good way are what’s influence a more positive customer experience in real time. And to from my marketing background, that sounds a lot like marketing. But from a CX practitioners point of view, it sounds a lot like CX because you’re in the moment and you’re you’re creating a great experience. So I don’t see that as a downside. I see it as a little bit of, you know, orgs need to figure out maybe a division of labor or who does what. But to me, that’s right at the intersection there. And I think that’s where the exciting stuff right now is happening.
Mark Slatin: Well, I’d love to talk a little bit more about some of the exciting stuff and the coolest stuff you’ve seen out there. I know you’ve been out and about and traveling, speaking and podcasting from all over the place. But before you do, let’s talk about the big deal. I always like to figure out why should the C-suite care? What’s the big deal about MarTech?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it’s clear anybody that reads the research and and all that. I mean, they know and anybody that listens to your show, like they know the importance of customer experience and they know that brands that lead with customer experience are performing better. The challenge gets into again, it’s this intersection between these these disciplines. And, you know, it’s it’s always a problem when an organization makes their org chart the customer’s problem, right? So it’s like, it’s these, it’s these gaps in these areas where the marketing handoff to CX or the marketing handoff to sales or something like that. These are the gaps where problems occur and where customers start having like, okay, you know, they start having some challenges. So leaders need to understand this. They also need to understand that there are huge opportunities to influence customer experience, loyalty, behavior, word of mouth, you name it, in the moment, not after the fact, you know, you can do that after the fact, but like in the moment is where really exciting and important things can happen. And leaders that are not capitalizing on that, they’re just they’re just passing up opportunities. And they’re hoping that they can kind of capitalize on a positive experience. a day, a week, a month after the fact, and that’s just too late.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. So it is a big deal. And by capitalizing some of these things in the moment, the experience that customers have, rather than being too late, you could affect loyalty, could drive loyalty, which ultimately leads to better business outcomes.
Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right. Yeah. And it’s, it’s the, you know, it’s the experience orchestration. I mean, you know, as I was at the Forrester show the other week, and, you know, I was on a panel talking about this stuff, which is, you know, journey orchestration, you know, everybody listening to this probably familiar with journey mapping, and, you know, journey orchestration kind of grew out of this from my perspective, it grew out of this marketing world of like marketing automation of like, okay, I want someone to do this, then this, then this, and then they’ll become my customer. When you really the modern and the better approach is What’s the best thing for the customer to do next? What’s the best thing for the customer to see next? Let’s let the customer guide the experience and the journey, instead of dictating what happens to them. When companies have the, you know, you’ve got to have the tools in place to do that. But you also have to have the right mindset. And you have to have people thinking about this stuff in the right way. That’s where I see, you know, leaders need to be focused on this stuff. And I don’t, I think they get it intellectually, but I don’t think they’re necessarily putting the strategy and the processes in place to do it.
Mark Slatin: So one of the guests that I had on was Joe Pine, who wrote The Experienced Economy and one of the really the founders of what we now call customer experience along with Luke Carbone. And Joe talks about this idea of, well, initially it was mass customization, moving into this idea of personalization. And this idea is that there is the one-to-one relationship with the customer. There aren’t mass markets, there’s just customers. And this move toward unique personalization, and kind of hearing that in the themes of what you just shared, right?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, many people, I mean, I would consider myself one of them, you know, I’ve been talking about this for a while, but you know, it’s, it’s always, when it comes down to it, you know, small organizations don’t have the bandwidth to do this one to one, they do it, they do it manually, you know, they pick up the phone, and they talk with their their customers, because maybe they have a small, small enough customer set, large orgs, you’d think they’d have the resources and the dollars and the bandwidth to do this. But this gets exponentially more difficult to personalize to, you know, if you have 10 audience segments, that’s 10 variations across six different channels across five different journey stages, you know, do the math and all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter how many people you have on your team. That’s a lot of work. What’s really exciting to me right now and about AI is, you know, chat to BT is cool. And I have fun playing around with stuff. But generative AI actually lets us like start exploring this world of we actually could generate a one-to-one experience and a one-to-one content match for every single individual. And it doesn’t take additional human resources. It takes some human strategy to put it together, but it doesn’t take one person writing an individual piece of copy for every single customer out of 10 million customers, it takes the right process in place. To me, like, that’s what I’m excited about right now. And I the time is, if not here, it’s like, it’s almost we’re within minutes on the on the scale of Martek and, and CX and stuff of this really coming to fruition.
Mark Slatin: So would it be fair to say that a myth is that this is some futuristic idea that we can shift from mass customization to one-to-one personalization, meaning that, as you described earlier in the journey map or journey orchestration pieces, that kind of let the customers drive their journey, let them be in control of it. And with the ability of generative AI, we might be getting really close to it. It may not be a myth anymore.
Greg Kihlstrom: I think we’re really close. And, you know, there’s some areas, there’s, you know, highly regulated industries, there’s, there’s gonna be some things that they don’t want to just kind of let loo, even, there’s ways around some of that stuff. But still, you know, there’s, there’s some, there’s some areas where, you know, healthcare and FinServ and stuff, like, there might be some areas where they don’t just want the AI to, you know, make make stuff up or something like that. But there are a lot of areas right now that are, some are ready, some are almost ready. And there’s components of it that are definitely ready, you know, today to start doing this stuff. And you know, if you’re if you’re an enterprise org, and not actively working on this stuff, like you’re going to be behind and you know, within a year,
Mark Slatin: So Greg, let me ask you, what are some strategies? And then I want to talk about some cool stuff that you’ve seen out there. But what are some, give me three strategies that a leader, whether it’s a CX leader, a business leader, senior management can, or an organization can use to implement relative to MarTech to impact customer experience.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, I’ll just I’ll make it kind of simple here, because I think, you know, I think of everything in, you know, it used to be called the three legged stool, I, I’ve added a fourth leg to it in my the way I talk, but, you know, it’s people process data and platform. And so platforms already taken care of, because we’re talking about MarTech. you need a people strategy, you need a data strategy, and you need a process strategy. And so, the people strategy is how do humans work and augment their work with AI tools. I think that’s the biggest challenge right now for leaders to figure out is AI should not replace your teams, but AI should augment them. And just thinking through what does that really mean? Do you have the right people to do that right now? You may not have the right people, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to need to… I’ve heard people say they want to cut their marketing teams or their CX teams in half or something. I think that’s a terrible idea. I think it’s getting the right people on the teams. And yeah, maybe you cut a, you know, you cut a couple roles here or there. But it’s really that augmentation. From a process standpoint, I think it’s, you know, it’s similar, similar to that is like, what, what do humans do best? in a world where they can automate a lot of stuff, they can get the first drafts of a lot of things ready to go, and just save a lot of time, focus people, get your people really smart on strategy, and understanding the next piece, which is data. I mean, if we’re living in a world where AI is driving more and more of what we do, the first thing you’ve got to do, and I guess I’m talking about this last, but I should have talked about it first, you’ve got to get your data house in order if you’re going to rely on AI to do anything. And so, some of the orgs that I work with, the very large ones, that’s the very first step. We think through some nice use cases and wouldn’t it be cool if, but the very first thing we do is get the data house in order and are we going to be able to support all this stuff so that people process and platforms can actually perform.
Mark Slatin: Greg, I think it’s interesting what you said about get the data in order. It reminds me of Winning on Purpose, Fred Reichelt’s newest book. And he talked about a story of a CEO who went into a meeting, and I think it was a rental car, a large, very large rental car company. And he asked a C-suite, you know, how many customers do we have? And the room was silent. And he’s saying, You can tell me how many cars I have in every country in the world and how many cars are sitting on a lot, how many we rented out. But you can’t tell me how many customers we have. We have a problem. And he was pounding on the table. So when you say get your house in order, your data house in order, it really is being able to not just have data lakes and data warehouses and data in all these places, but be able to you know, call up what you need, when you need it, and make sure it’s accurate. Is that right?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s there’s no shortage of data. I mean, I think everyone, every org, no matter how big or small, they’re collecting way too much stuff. They’ll they’ll never actually be able to use most of it, you know, to the degree that it could be used. But yeah, being able to structure it and or have AI or other other tools structure it for you. That’s really the trick. And, you know, are you are you what you just said, are you giving people the right access to the right time to be able to do stuff with it? And sometimes that’s a platform that does something with it. But more often, you know, it’s going to be having the people have the right access to the right stuff to help them make decisions.
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Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, if it’s a byproduct of becoming way more efficient and all those things, then so be it. But it’s, I mean, I write this LinkedIn newsletter, I call it AI isn’t a goal or a strategy. And so AI, I mean, it’s a tool to help us do better work, be more strategic, so on and so forth. So to think of it as, okay, I’m going to reduce my headcount because chat GPT is installed on our machines, I think that’s the wrong it’s just the wrong way of thinking altogether. Again, it may be a byproduct. But you know, I mean, what we’ve seen time and time again, I mean, you know, historically, technological advances create more jobs than they than the, you know, there’s the there’s this adjustment period. And I think we are we are going to go through some of that. I mean, there’s been some layoffs, you know, over the last year or two, even, but there’s going to be some adjustment. But couple of years from now, I think we’re going to be looking back and seeing that this was an opportunity. It’s hard to know, you know, what is going to happen two minutes, let alone, you know, two years from now. But I think we’re going to look back and see this as a major opportunity where humans might actually enjoy their jobs better, because they’re kind of the some of the drudgery is lifted off of our shoulders.
Mark Slatin: Yeah. Well, I appreciate what you’re saying. I agree that there’s probably human natures we fear. We fear losing jobs. We fear how AI is going to change the world. I want to affirm something that you said, if I could, using a former guest, Horst Schulze, who is the co-founder and former president of the Ritz Carlton Hotels. And he said, look, there are four things that companies need to focus on, starting with hotel industry, but expanding well beyond that, is they need to get customers, they need to keep customers, they need to grow the business with customers, and then they need to get cost efficiencies. And to your point on the cost efficiency piece, he said, but never at the expense of the customer experience. He used the word customer service, but today we know it as customer experience, right? So the idea there is what we’re trying to do, yes, if we can automate something that was a human activity that took a long time to do and then machines can help speed that up or crunch it so we don’t need as much bandwidth from humans, great. But ultimately, how can it augment the experience for customers so that you can earn more loyalty and trust from your customers and get and grow share of wallet and things like that, right?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think some of the some of the opportunities there are, you know, what if your employees had better information and could literally ask any question that they wanted to democratizing data and and access to it and to help your customers. So, you know, you think about that in terms of customer service. There’s lots of tools already available that help indicate if a customer is upset and give sentiment, like real-time sentiment. There’s other things that will pull up data about a customer in real time, or opportunities to… It’s not just about upselling and cross-selling even. There’s lots of ways that employees can help. And that does require a person, you know, that employee to deliver the message, or, you know, maybe decipher, okay, of three options, this is the one that I think might be best, but it’s powered by data, it’s powered by AI. And that’s, to me, that’s like the that’s the win win is, you know, customers, I mean, I, I like doing things self service, you know, but not everybody loves that experience. And, and, you know, there’s, there’s always going to be that use for that frontline employee, too. So finding ways to, to keep them in the mix, and, you know, just have that win win, I think is important.
Mark Slatin: Yeah, yeah. So many great points. So we talked about some of the myths. We talked about mistakes. We talked about some strategies that you shared. Tell us about some cool stuff you see happening in the world of MarTech. Perhaps it could involve AI. You’ve been out there. You’ve been at conferences and shows. What do you hear? What are some things that are tools or whatever that are striking your fancy?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, you know, kind of to what I what I was just talking about, I think the self service, like, from an employee standpoint, the the idea that I could query my Martek, you know, data, my CX data, all that stuff and say, you know, what’s the biggest complaint from the last 30 days from customers at a specific location? You know, I just did a demo with a, you know, with a platform that allows this to happen. And so to be able to say, like, to make a data request to an internal team to say, hey, I need you to create me a dashboard and pull this, this and this data in it. And in an enterprise org, that’s like a two month request, you know, let’s face it, it’s a slow process to do that. What if you just like you’re talking with chat, GPT, or whatever, what if you just ask that question, and all of a sudden, you’re able to solve a real problem in a real location, immediately. To me, that is like super exciting stuff. And it doesn’t require me to go me to go out and learn Python and be a data scientist and all that stuff. It just requires me to like, empathize with a customer and ask the right question. And maybe I asked the wrong question the first five times, but it’s so quick and easy. I can, you know, I can keep asking until I get the right you know, until I asked the right one. So I mean, I think there’s there’s stuff like that, that’s really exciting. And then, you know, I’ll go back to the the experience orchestration stuff, which is what I’m really focused on, just with with my consulting work is looking at, you know, how do we kind of turn this journey orchestration and marketing automation thing on its head and really build experiences around our customers. That takes a lot of like it, it sounds cool and neat. And man, you know, if we could just pull a switch, and wouldn’t that be great, but it takes a lot of coordination behind the scenes of really changing the way that organizations that, we talk about silos and that’s a cliche, but it’s real. It’s a cliche for a reason, breaking down silos so that teams can work together to actually deliver this omni-channel experience that customers, I know I love it. Customers love this way of thinking, but it requires organizations to really change the way that they’re structured. But I think that’s really where it’s at right now, and I’m pretty focused on it.
Mark Slatin: Yeah, and you threw a word out that most CX people would be familiar with, marketing people would be familiar. So Omnichannel, we’re talking really about the customer’s ability to engage with you whenever, wherever, however they want, including starting an engagement. in one channel and ending in another, right?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s um, I mean, depending on the stats you look at, I mean, people are switching between at least like five or six channels during a typical this is like B2C, you know, during a typical sales process of, you know, 12, 13, 15, who knows how many channels there are now. So it’s like, if you are a brand out there, you’ve got to be great at like 15 different channels, not knowing which five or six someone is going to use. And those five or six better be consistent. And they better talk with one another. Because I mean, you know, we’ve all been you know, use the, you know, the customer service example of like, why do I keep having to repeat my problem to this person, then that, that happened, that doesn’t just happen in customer service that happens everywhere, you know, that that handshake of data, like customers, just they don’t have patience for that anymore.
Mark Slatin: So a lot of positives, a lot of ways that we can use AI and MarTech to improve the customer experience, to make the experience more seamless for the customer, more pain-free for the employee delivering the experience, and what senior management I would love to hear is that I can improve cost efficiencies, I can speed up the delivery of the experience and the service, I can improve loyalty and therefore gain more share of wallet, repeat purchases and all that good stuff and obviously affect all the financial outcomes like revenue and profits, right?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it sounds pretty utopian. There’s a lot of work, obviously, that goes into it. But it’s like, you know, I and I always, I always try to stress the this focus on, you know, lifetime value. I mean, this is an investment in in your customers to do this, you know, it’s not easy. It takes change. But when you’re focused on that lifetime value of customers, when you’re focused on lifetime value of employees, and you know, I would even introduce this concept of business lifetime value as well. And just thinking of like, when we’re thinking about the longer term, I know that’s hard for shareholder driven companies to, you know, you can’t just do that, right? You’ve got it, you’ve got to think short term and long term. But when you’re more focused on that lifetime value, like, yeah, all of a sudden, these investments become pretty, pretty no brainer to make. And and it doesn’t take that long to start seeing incremental improvements on this stuff when you’re able to optimize interactions, you know, pretty much, you know, day one on turning some of these systems on.
Mark Slatin: Great stuff, Greg. So much fun, so many insights, great strategies, great way to think about that. I love that people, processes, and data, and you talked about platforms as well. So we got to land the plane here, but before we do, I want to ask the same question I ask all my guests, which is, what advice would you give to your 20-year-old self?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s great. Probably a lot of things, but I’ll edit it for the for the for the show here. You know, I think I a good and bad thing about me, I, I like a lot of different things. And I love to learn. But I think, you know, focusing on a few on a few things probably would have gotten me a little bit further a little a little quicker. So you know, I feel like now at the point I am in my life, I, I talked about all this, all this stuff. And I, you know, I love to learn, but really, it ends up being about process for me and process improvement for me. Everything else is, are things that I have to know. And so yeah, my advice would just be to, you know, maybe focus a little bit, you know, not, not a ton, but you know, a little bit.
Mark Slatin: There you go. There you go. Greg, if people wanted to get ahold of you, what would be the best way?
Greg Kihlstrom: Sure, sure. Yeah. So two things. So I’m super active on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me there. Greg Kihlstrom, you should be able to find there’s not too many of us that you should be able to find me there. And then you can go to my website and see the podcast and my books and stuff like that. It’s just Greg Kihlstrom dot com.
