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Episode 22

How Automation Brings B2B Marketers Closer To Customers

Eric Ehlers
Director of Manufacturing/Industrial Solutions at ServiceNow
Impact of Marketing Automation, IoT & AI

In this episode, we explore the impact that IoT and AI powered solutions have on manufacturing and industrial businesses. Learn how B2B marketers can introduce new revenue streams, get closer to their customers and deliver self-directed experiences that delight and retain customers.

Highlights From This Episode:

  • What is workflow automation
  • The role of marketing automation, IoT and AI in B2B organizations
  • How workflow automation can benefit B2B marketing
  • How to identify if workflow automation is right for your business
  • How to validate and implement new technology
  • How to measure the effectiveness of automation

Watch the Live Recording

Full Episode Transcripts

Tessa Burg: Welcome to another episode of Lead(er) Generation brought to you by Tenlo Radio. I’m your host Tessa Burg. And today I’m with Eric Ehlers. Eric joins us from ServiceNow. He is the Director of Manufacturing/ Industrial Solutions and today we have a very exciting topic. We’re gonna explore the impact IOT and AI power solutions have in manufacturing and industrial businesses. Eric, thank you so much for joining us. We’re excited to have you as a guest.

Eric Ehlers: Yeah. Great to be here and hope everyone’s doing well out there.

Tessa Burg: So let’s start a little bit about you and ServiceNow, give us some background on your role at the company and what types of services does Service Now offer?

Eric Ehlers: Yeah, so let’s start with ServiceNow. So ServiceNow is a software as a service company it’s been around oh, over 12 years now, originally started in the IT service management space.

Eric Ehlers: So if you’re not familiar with ITSM or IT service management effectively, it’s a platform for your IT teams to help manage your day-to-day IT. So if you needed your laptop or your phone, or to change your password, that’s generally going through an IT service management system also known as a help desk or ticketing system, that’s where Service Now’s roots were.

Eric Ehlers: But ultimately what happened was is that the company really developed a powerful workflow engine. And we’ll talk a little bit about workflow is in a little bit, but we built this workflow engine in which customers actually started going outside of IT, sort of organically where they were building workflows to support things around customer service and HR and building applications that were very specific to their business.

Eric Ehlers: And so the company has since evolved over the past decade and sort of to expanding into these other areas of the business. So we’re very heavily in HR, we’re heavy in customer service, we build low-code no-code applications. We’re still building big in IT, and subsequently though, because all of our customers are in an industry, what also what’s happening is that we were seeing a lot of drive towards building line of business, a sort of workflows to support their day-to-day core operations.

Eric Ehlers: So in the last two years, we started launching specific products and industries. So we started off in financial services and telecom, and then this year we’re launching products in manufacturing and healthcare. And I look after the manufacturing vertical.

Eric Ehlers: So in my day to day, I work with Service Now customers to help them understand where Service Now can help solve problems, specifically in their horizontal view, but also then, working with the teams and our customers develop our industry specific roadmap. So building core solutions for the manufacturing vertical as well. And so that’s what I do in my day to day in terms of looking at the industry and then also working with our customers and sales teams to help support customers.

Tessa Burg: Wow, that is definitely a lot. And I think it’s interesting that you started in this IT services management platform, but now you’re getting into some areas that are familiar to marketers, like low-code or no-code solutions that help automate specific types of activities. Tell us a little bit about how workflow automation, whether it’s the process or application of it, can be used or does benefit marketers.

Eric Ehlers: Yeah. So I think, in this day to day in this day and age, years ago I was working with a company and he said sort of everyone is technically in the marketing department, so you’re marketing, when you’re in the marketing department, you’re sort of seen as, the sort of customer lens of things and you represent the customer, but really everyone is there supporting the customer.

Eric Ehlers: And the reality of business in this data day and age is you can’t work in silos, you’ve gotta have the ability to connect all your different departments together and work seamlessly with those departments. So your customer services has to be connected to your operations and things of that nature. And so everyone’s sort of represents from a marketing standpoint, of that, workflow is really there to do a couple things.

Eric Ehlers: So workflows there to automate processes, there are things that we have to do every single day, and so you want to automate all those things throughout the day, you don’t wanna do redundant tasks, like people find doing redundant work kind of boring. So there’s like a lot of things you can do to automate that and make their work life better. But also then, the ability to sort of take that workflow and create a system of action so that everyone is working in the same workspace, so you have complete visibility of what’s going on across the entire company from customer service to your manufacturing, to your supply chain, everything.

Eric Ehlers: So you have a very holistic view of what’s going on and that enables you to ultimately drive better processes. You can drive better processes about your company from a marketing standpoint, taking that and then also using data to actionize on it.

Eric Ehlers: So one of the biggest challenges most companies have is they have all these different systems of record they’re working through, I have to pull data from here and I have to pull data from here, I’ve got a CRM system here and I’ve got my marketing analytics here and I don’t know what the right hand and left hand are doing.

Eric Ehlers: And what we do is sort of one, build that workflow engine, but then also create that platform. So you can see what everything that’s going on and then pull that data holistically. So then you can drive your continuous improvement and change management, things of that nature.

Eric Ehlers: So that’s where we’re adding a lot of value. So it’s not necessarily per se for marketing, but we’re sort of a halo effect where we have support all the things that marketers have to do in their day to day.

Tessa Burg: Yeah. We talk a lot about, sales and marketing alignment, making sure that there isn’t a silo between the tools, the data and the processes that sales teams use and marketers, and a lot of the things you just mentioned kind of set up marketing IT alignment because as marketers, we are concerned about the customer experience. And so if some manual things are being taken off our counterparts plates where it’s being automated, it seems like the output could bubble up to a better customer experience for businesses end users. Have you seen that be the case?

Eric Ehlers: Yeah, so I think, more and more companies nowadays are very much focused on the customer experience. And it’s no longer as a marketer. It’s traditionally was like, oh, here’s my product and if the product is really good, then the customer’s happy.

Eric Ehlers: But nowadays the shift has gone from, I wanna have a good experience with companies, and more and more companies, we’re a software as a subscription model, more and more companies are going to this recurring revenue model. And recurring revenue is really built on kind of two things it’s built on one, you have a very good product that people want to buy over and over again. But also the experience of working with those folks, when I do have a problem or issue, I need to change something that becomes critical.

Eric Ehlers: So you’re not just marketing the product anymore, you’re marketing the services and everything that goes around it. And that’s I think where the big change in marketing has happened, most all companies are moving to this recurring model. And so your customer service actually becomes your product.

Eric Ehlers: I think a lot of people are starting to sort of realize that. And so, whether companies interface with you directly, or it could be even virtual, like a lot of times nowadays, most people don’t actually wanna interface with a person. They wanna go to a portal or a website and have a discussion, have those automated AI chat bot discussions, not necessarily wait for someone to come in there. So that whole experience around how the customer service is just as critical as the product nowadays.

Tessa Burg: Now that is really interesting because that comes up a lot. Even here at Tenlo, we hear people wanting to move to more of this recurring revenue model. I’m not sure if they see that immediate connection to now your customer support and your expertise is really gonna come front and center and be the thing that you productize. So if a business is thinking about this, they want to explore recurring revenue or subscription model, or they at least want to start automating different components of their process to have a better experience. How would I know as just a business that I’m in need or workflow automation would benefit me and help me get to place?

Eric Ehlers: Well, I mean, it’s really gonna be dependent. Every sort of product is gonna be different. But what I would say is that regardless of what you’re going into, if you’re looking to do a recurring revenue model, you just gotta think through both, how do you connect the product with the services in front of it? And a lot of people make the mistake of thinking, okay, I’ve got a product I can just, for example, add some wifi or cellular chip in there and I can put it out there and now I’ve got a recurring revenue model and that’s not really good. And what actually happens is you’re gonna find is that if you don’t have the processes and systems in place, that’s gonna break your model. Because ultimately what you’re selling is you’re selling the product, but you’re also, you’re sort of selling the whole experience.

Eric Ehlers: And so when something does go wrong and inherently something will go wrong, or you have to update something, there are different people that are now involved in the products and the product support.

Eric Ehlers: Used to be, I’d sell the product that goes to a distributor and the distributor kind of ends it there. Right now I have a direct, I’m having a direct relationship with the customer, which is something retailers, manufacturers, drug device manufacturer, all these different folks typically didn’t have that in relationship with that customer. And so you have to think through not only is my customer service there, but do I have the field support supporting, Do I have the technical support to support it? Do I have the ability to be proactive? And make sure when something does go wrong, that I can proactively get people out there to help support and sort of build that whole experience.

Eric Ehlers: So it’s all about, you have to really think through the plan of, if I do this, who are all the different people up front that I need to connect, it’s not just a matter of, I have a connected product or I have a recurring revenue bundle. It’s a matter of, okay, I have to connect all these different departments and systems and everything like that. And that sounds like it could be very, sort of tedious up front but if you plan ahead of it, it’s better to do that upfront.

Eric Ehlers: A lot of times people just launch the product, get it out as quickly as they can and the customer has a really bad experience with it, or you’re not able to support it and then you’re just dead in the water from the get-go. So really sort of thinking through all those different things, how do I connect this? Who are the different stakeholders? What are the trials? Really what does that customer want at the end? And sort of designing that experience upfront is really critical. And then obviously you want to pick a platform that can then connect at all and then help support all those different areas.

Tessa Burg: Yeah. You made a really good point that we see a lot of businesses skip, which is to start with that experience first, how do you want customers to interact with you to interact with this new service? And I love what you said, it’s more than just putting a chip on something and starting to gather the data, because I think that’s the part people get most excited about and it’s physical and it’s tangible and you know where it’s gonna go and you sort of see all the possibilities, but starting with what’s the experience first can kind of help prioritize where some resources are gonna be shifting. So if they’re no longer manual work and we’re automating parts of that, where do we need to shift the thinking to deliver the service as best as possible?

Eric Ehlers: Yep. Yep, with that, we’re all going. I think every company is going through this process of trying to figure out how do I help my people do more. And so as you do that, you have to map your processes, and there, we talked about this a little earlier.

Eric Ehlers: There’s a lot of people doing a lot of redundant work and it’s just sort of soul crushing. And a lot of these things can be automated and people talk about, automation is gonna be the killer of the workforce. It’s really not automation if anything is gonna augment it so that, what you want to do is actually shift your focus away from those redundant tasks and put people on doing work that’s sort of the problem solving and ingenuity and using human ingenuity, AI machine learning is great, but it’s there to sort of help support. It’s not going to sort of necessarily displace someone.

Eric Ehlers: So that’s where you can add a lot of value in terms of like, where can I streamline this process what’s redundant and where can I put people to focus on areas that really matter?

Tessa Burg: Yeah. I’m so glad you brought that up because I think that’s what makes AI scary to a lot of manufacturing and industrial and I’m sure you hear that a lot. They love their people. There some people have been in rolls for decades and they’re doing an awesome job and now I’m gonna, change it on them or our organization isn’t good with change. So how, do you have any tools or tips that people can use to help bring people along who maybe are just resistant to change or perhaps aren’t really clear on how AI can help empower as opposed to displace?

Eric Ehlers: Yeah. I mean, look, the reality is if you look at manufacturing right now, it’s just that’s my day to day, there’s gonna be by 2030, there’s going to be a shortage of like 2.1 million workers, We’ve talked about this labor shortage everywhere. Manufacturing, as an example has been really sort of, is really been critical and it’s not that, manufacturers can’t attract talent. It’s just that the talent is different than what it was 20, 30 years ago. And you’re no longer necessarily fixing things with a wrench, but you’re fixing things with a laptop. But you also have this challenge of a lot of legacy workers are now retiring, in fact COVID, we’ve actually seen accelerated a lot of baby boomers just ended up retiring overall.

Eric Ehlers: And so, one of the things that’s important is one, you’ve gotta capture all this kind of knowledge in one space. You’ve got a lot of institutional knowledge in your organization that you don’t want that knowledge to walk out the door.

Eric Ehlers: So I think it’s really, really critical to digitize both your knowledge base, your workers and everything like that. That’s sort of the first thing is, building that system so that you’ve got the ability to do that. And having that knowledge base ultimately will help your subject matter experts over time.

Eric Ehlers: This is where AI can be very helpful in terms of, we’re humans we can only retain so much information and we have our specialties, so we’re not really built to help support that, but we can automate that with artificial intelligence. And if you’ve got sort of like a knowledge base that says, all right, in my day-to-day role, I have standard operating procedures. I need to follow the standard operating procedures. And I have to do these daily fixes and I can see, things that are wrong, or I have a case, or I have an event or something I had to do this AI can help service up.

Eric Ehlers: So as an example, I’m working at a machine, I get an error code, if I have a tablet with a knowledge base, I can pull it up and AI can say, well, in 90% of the time, this fix works on this machine, you’re still fixing the machine physically, or you’re changing something in the system, but AI just gets you there faster. So rather than sitting there trying to diagnose and diagnose, if you can aggregate all that information in one spot, it really helps people work and that’s just, that’s the manufacturing example.

Eric Ehlers: There’s day to day things like a call center or everyone needs this in their day to day. Like if you can sort of capture that knowledge in a senior placement, AI can help serve up the right fixes for you to sort of move on and do your job and be more productive. And so that’s kind of where we’re seeing is that AI is helping people be more productive.

Eric Ehlers: Again, you don’t want to carry binders anymore and you don’t wanna, you don’t have the ability to go run up to the library or do anything like that. This is where a sort of, cloud and software helps in that it can help speed people to be more productive.

Eric Ehlers: Back in the day we would go write a term paper, we’d go to a library, we’d spend hours and hours and hours there. Now I can pick it up, look through that and that, drive it there. So even the kind of things that like it’s augmenting and helping people. And so that’s the way to think of that. And machine learning is another one. That’s to help you see the patterns, people can see the patterns, sometimes you’ve got these brilliant people that can just sort of see the patterns and go from there. But oftentimes those patterns are underneath thing and you’ve gotta sort of aggregate all the different things together.

Eric Ehlers: And so if you want to make changes or fixes and do things in your organization, you can drive things with that using machine learning to help you see the patterns, and then using that human ingenuity to then actually fix it. Machine learning is just gonna give you the information, but it’s gonna help you aggregate the information. And so that’s the way to think of AI and machine learning together is it’s a way to augment there and help you be better to help drive the day-to-day outcomes and drive your business better.

Tessa Burg: Yeah. That definitely saves a lot of time. So instead of hunting for all the information and kind of aggregating and pulling it together yourself, pulling the patterns forward and then getting recommendations, allows businesses to do more with less resources.

Eric Ehlers: Yeah, yeah. And you’ve only got a finite number of subject matter experts, usually in one company, and in the old way of working, if something happens, you would put that person on a plane, they’d have to fly six hours they’d have to go some place. Then they get in there, and it’s like, you waste 12, 20, 24 hours to get a fix. The better way to do things now is to take those SMEs and give them the tools that sort of can help, allow them to aggregate all that information so people don’t always have to get on a plane, either people can self-serve and find it themselves, or they can quickly collaborate with these SMEs to do their work better.

Tessa Burg: That’s awesome. So let’s take a step back and talk about IOT, which might be a part of the equation of getting some of that data into the system. When you guys engage with a client, do they already have a plan for IOT, or they already have data that they’re collecting they just don’t know what to do with it? Or is there help or resources where someone can kind of find opportunities? Hey, in my manufacturing process, here’s where IOT or collecting this type of data through a device might help me improve or might help me get more out of machine learning and AI.

Eric Ehlers: Yeah. I mean, again going back to where machine learning and AI comes together the more data you have, the better informed you can be. And so if you’re selling services or you’re selling a specific type of solution, that data can ultimately be aggregated to ultimately deliver a better customer experience. You can kind of see what’s going wrong in the field, it lessens your blind spots.

Eric Ehlers: So if you’re a marketer or you’re an engineering person, I have a better understanding of what’s going on with my product in the field, so the ultimately then I can then take that and circle that back into the product life cycle.

Eric Ehlers: Or as a marketer, I can come back and say, Hey, we see these types of opportunities here or customers are asking for this. So just that wealth of information, helps you drive both your product life cycle, but also then also the customer experience, you can take both. So that’s really the power of IOT. And once you have that sort of system, the systems in place you can then take that machine learning and that AI, that ultimately drives, you’re aggregating that data looking at the patterns, automating things proactively.

Eric Ehlers: Nobody wants to call up and ask for a fix anymore. It’s like, if something’s gonna break now, I want the truck out here, I don’t even want to call. I just want someone to come out here and fix it. I don’t wanna have those conversations.

Eric Ehlers: And so again, that’s another opportunity within marketers to say, all right, building these platforms, like it’s no longer going back to the product discussion, it’s let’s build the product but then also what does that experience ultimately, AI and machine learning then helps then support that it helps create the better experience. You can be more proactive, you can service things better, but also then you can take the data from all that information and really build better products from it, build better experiences for your customers and sort of continue to fine tune that over time.

Eric Ehlers: So that’s sort of where all the opportunity is with marketers and manufacturers and kind of how that sort of aggregating together. It’s how you take that data and applying it, but then also finding the patterns, finding the solutions, taking that information and keep re-injecting it into your product life cycle.

Tessa Burg: Yeah. This is a really big challenge in marketing is customer retention. And so I feel like the pandemic has really accelerated the shift in focus for a lot of marketers, especially in manufacturing and industrial from just always generating leads, that’s the title of this podcast. We’re always hyper-focused on leads, but one thing that happened as a result of the pandemic, when a lot of processes and logistics broke down is what am I doing for my customers? How am I addressing this most efficiently and making it better? And the self-directed. So the more I feel like the shift in alignment and marketing to IT is, how am I leveraging this data to get closer to the customers I already have, so that I can find more like them and onboard them more efficiently in a way that’s gonna help them, or make them want to stay.

Eric Ehlers: And I think most people who’ve been in marketing and sales long enough knows that it’s, you actually sell more to your existing customers. It’s your cost of sale is lower. And so anytime you can take data to continue to expand that relationship, that’s where it’s critical.

Eric Ehlers: And that’s where I think a lot of people are putting their bets on IOT and AI, is how do I leverage those customer relationships to expand them? I mean, the cost, the time it takes to bring on a new customer, everyone wants new customers, everyone wants new leads, but like there’s a big investment up front.

Eric Ehlers: If you can service those existing customers and expand those relationships, your revenue and your margins way higher. So that’s sort of where, why everyone’s going into recurring revenue and trying to figure that out. But then also it’s like, how do I expand those relationships? And you do that by looking at the data, but then also understanding from that experience standpoint, if that customer is having a good experience, they’re gonna stay with you. And they’re gonna open up their wallet more and more to help to work with you.

Tessa Burg: Yes. So one another thing that comes up in marketing all the time, regardless of where we’re working in customer journey is the metrics. So if I started looking at leveraging workflow automation in the company, what are some of the metrics that bubble up as yes, this automated flow or this use of machine learning AI has been successful and had the impact that we wanted it to have on our business?

Eric Ehlers: Yeah. I mean, it’s pretty broad, but I mean, one, obviously, we look at, we we’re very focused on customer service, so how are we helping customers drive better NPS? So, if you’ve got, workflow automating that backend, making it easy for customers to sort of work with you, giving them the answers that they need, that’s ultimately is gonna help you drive better net promoter score.

Eric Ehlers: So that’s it from a sort of customer service standpoint, internally you can also score how your employees, there’s the internal satisfaction of your workers, if you’re a worker and you’re consistently doing redundant work and it’s not challenging, and you’re not feeling like you’re appreciated in it, nobody wants to sort of stagnant career. And so I think also, understanding how those workers are, do they feel like they’re doing the right? Are they focusing on the right things? So you can look at some of the internal metrics in terms of employee satisfaction, do I like coming to my job every day? Is it easy for me to do my work or is it challenging because I am sort of navigating all these different systems and work and everything like that. And it’s like every day it’s sort of like, I’m playing traffic cop. I mean, that’s not a great one either.

Eric Ehlers: And then there’s sort of the bottom line metrics, if you can reduce costs, the reduced the cost to serve, everyone’s going to be doing more with less, that’s just the reality of it. We’ve seen the workforce challenges here, how do you then sort of improve productivity? So you can look at things like productivity, reducing your cost to serve, and then if you’re in the services business, and obviously you wanna look at the margins of reducing office services.

Eric Ehlers: So those are just some of the things that you can think of. But, from a marketing standpoint, I’m looking at net promoter score, I’m looking at employee experience, I’m looking at improving my margin profile, reducing cost to serve. I think those are some of the main things that people generally focus on.

Tessa Burg: That’s awesome. Like if I am, I mean, this is the podcast, no one can see this, but I could see like, automation right in the center and the best way to scope out what we should do with that automation, where do we start? What’s the best process? Is first say, how is it gonna benefit the customer? How are we gonna retain, how are we going to grow our business? And then say, what type of data should we be getting, if I don’t collect data today, or maybe I have not started really looking at data in a critical strategic way. We run into that a lot. People have a lot of data, they just don’t know what to do with it. Tell me a little bit of your experience in that realm.

Eric Ehlers: Yeah. So I just to add on that, I think that one of the challenges, actually there’s two problems with data, it’s like now we actually probably have too much data. And you know, you can pretty much pull data off everything and you can work with a lot of these analytics platforms. And I think this is actually, when we talk about going back to IOT, one of the things we’re really good at, we figured out the connectivity piece, we can put a chip in just about anything. And we can get that data back and we can process that data.

Eric Ehlers: But what we’re companies really struggle with is like, what do I do with the data? Because now there’s so much data coming in that it’s actually causing this data paralysis. So our analysis paralysis, as I like to call it. So it’s like, I have so much information. I don’t know what to do with it. And again, this is where kind of AI and machine learning can help. It’s helped me pull out the big trends that I need to do and understand about that and help me then drive action around that, because data without action is kind of worthless. It’s just a rock sitting on the ground.

Eric Ehlers: And so that’s where I think that people, that’s sort of the thing you have to think of, it’s sort of, I can get data, how do I aggregate that data? How do I pull from multiple systems? But then what is the critical data that I need to do to do my job? And then how can I action it? And that’s where workflow comes in is that you can design the actioning around it. Like if these things happen, this triggers this event and I need this person to do it, or this happens, I need it to go here and this is the right person to get to it.

Eric Ehlers: So I think that’s the biggest thing that people need to start thinking through is, we figured out the data problem, we figured out the connectivity problem. Now this sort of last mile is what’s the action that then we do about it? And that can be human action, or it can be AI action or machine learning action, but it’s sort of getting the right information to the right person at the right time so that they can solve the problems really what’s critical. So thinking through all of that is really, and so what’s that last mile? How do I action it and what do I do with it? That’s the part that I think most people forget and that’s really the most important part about it.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, I love that exercise. If I have a bunch of actions and activities that I’ve come up with, how would you recommend I would go about prioritizing those things? I want to do all of this.

Eric Ehlers: You got to prioritize, yeah. There’s no way. So, and again, this is where technology can help you, you need to sort of figure out a criticality and a scoring thing and we do this in our house every day, we’ve got things going on in our house, I’ve got to fix these things, hanging a picture on the wall versus, my sink is overflowing, we have to prioritize based on, those kinds of things and the same goes into business, you want to get to all of them eventually, but it’s really creating that sort of scoreboard of understanding what’s a critical need versus what’s a nice to have.

Eric Ehlers: And this is where technology can really help you, sort of help you prioritize what’s that criticality. And you can sort of build the workflow and the programming behind it to say, Hey, of my tasks, that I’ve gotta do every day, these are my critical ones, if I get all these done, then I moved to the next and I moved to the next and sort of that it just helps us process that daily. Otherwise we’re just kind of running, we’re creating fire drills across everywhere we go and everything becomes a fire. And the reality, everything’s not a fire, some things can just take the time you can work to it and you can get to it eventually.

Eric Ehlers: So I think that that’s another piece where, when you think through workflow and kind of building that out, how do you prioritize well this is where technology helps. You always try to prioritize your critical things that are necessary and then sort of work your way through those. And then you can also manage your resources better that way, because you might have some resources that are better here and you might have some resources or a better there, and you can assign your resources based on where that criticality is.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, I love that suggestion, especially when use technology can always, what I call like blame the process, then it’s not, one person’s opinion versus another it’s like, listen, we came up with a methodology we pulled out the patterns and here, based on our business, how customers interact with us and how we run our processes is where we should focus first.

Eric Ehlers: Yeah. And it’s like, it’s an everlasting cycle. Like most people come from manufacturing, Kaizen, Six Sigma and everything like that. You’re always looking at continuous improvement and reducing waste. People think of that as kind of a manufacturing thing, but you can really apply it anywhere. It applies in marketing.

Eric Ehlers: We have processes in marketing and you should always continue to sort of look through, all right, how do I apply this process here? Where can I reduce waste? Where can I automate and make things better? And so, people invest in their marketing stack to do this. That’s why we have marketing automation tools and CRM tools and things of that nature. So thinking through that whole part of it is critical.

Eric Ehlers: And so, again, you can workflow just about anything, it’s just a matter of taking the time to map it, but also understanding it’s a never ending process. You’re always gonna come back and fine tune and fine tune and fine tune.

Tessa Burg: Yeah, well that is all the time that we have. I think this is a huge opportunity for marketers who are interested in improving their customer retention and especially starting to shift into marketing IT alignment in order to improve that experience through all the metrics you said, I think it also, retaining employees and retaining people that institutional knowledge and giving them new opportunities is really exciting. So Eric, if people wanted to get ahold of you, how can they reach you?

Eric Ehlers: Yeah. You can look up me up on my LinkedIn profile, happy to connect with anyone on LinkedIn, or I will have a blog as well, and we can provide that link with the podcast here. So we’ll have that out here in a couple of weeks so.

Tessa Burg: Awesome that is fantastic. Well, thanks so much for joining us and if you want to check out more about ServiceNow, it’s servicenow.com and we’ll put that link along with Eric’s blog on the website at tenlo.com just click on podcasts and you can see all of the previous episodes as well. All right. Well, thank you Eric for joining us and I’m sure we’ll be talking again soon.

Eric Ehlers: Great. Thanks for your time. Bye.

Tessa Burg: Bye.

Eric Ehlers

Director of Manufacturing/Industrial Solutions at ServiceNow

Eric Ehlers is the Director of Manufacturing/Industrial Solutions at ServiceNow. He has 15+ years of experience leading global outreach, strategic marketing, optimization and creative development strategies.

Eric is driven by his passion for B2B, digital marketing and technology. His career includes a solid record of capturing audiences, delivering significant revenue growth in highly competitive global markets and developing extensive marketing operations for high-tech industries.

Manufacturing Marketing

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