Beyond the Hype: Technology For Today’s Marketers

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg, and today I am joined by John Arnold and we are so excited to have him. He is the perfect guest to help us explore. Beyond the hype, what is really happening in marketing tech today, and what is the future of human versus automation and marketing automation platforms and other technologies that we’re all testing and trying every day to work faster, better, smarter.

[00:00:34] Tessa Burg: John, thank you so much for joining us. I know we first met. Uh, back when you were at Forrester, but to open up, tell us a little bit about your role now at Creatio.

[00:00:47] John Arnold: Yeah. Thanks Tessa. Nice to see you again. And, uh, yeah, I guess my journey to Creatio was kind of a wild one. I started my career in a lot of, uh, B2B MarTech selling to other marketers and, um, some startups, some, uh, big companies like Adobe along the way, but.

[00:01:04] John Arnold: Um, I found my way to Creatio through Forrester, so I spent five and a half years. Uh, my research area was around B2B growth strategies. Uh, I worked with a lot of CMOs and, and SVPs of marketing in the B2B space to connect technology to the marketing journey. And, uh, along came Creatio as a sort of a, a newcomer in a way to some of the, the marketing automation world.

[00:01:30] John Arnold: Um, because, uh, Creatio is a, a, a no-code platform and also a CRM and a bunch of other things. Um, it’s, it’s really not one thing, so it’s kind of hard to put your, uh, put your finger on it. And when I was at Forrester and, and saw Creatio come along, coming along, um, I immediately was captivated by some demonstrations that they gave to me around the AI and how that was gonna change marketing.

[00:01:52] John Arnold: And I was working on some research around how marketing was gonna change as a result of ai. And I realized that Creatio was kind of disrupting all of the things that I wat thinking about, so, uh, decided to, uh, make the, make the giant leap and put my money where my mouth was in terms of how AI’s gonna change marketing, uh, and actually join Creatio.

[00:02:10] John Arnold: So here I am. And, uh, you know, like you said, it’s great to, um, have this conversation with you because I know we’ve had other conversations in the past about

[00:02:19] Tessa Burg: Yeah.

[00:02:19] John Arnold: Uh, all this technology and how great it’s gonna be for marketers.

[00:02:22] Tessa Burg: I know that is a bold move and you said it really addressed a lot of the things that you had on your mind.

[00:02:30] Tessa Burg: Tell us a little bit more about what was on your mind when you were at Forrester. What were those biggest shifts and lessons that you witnessed from an industry perspective happening in the MarTech landscape?

[00:02:45] John Arnold: Yeah, so when I was at Forrester, I was really thinking that AI was going to disrupt three things.

[00:02:50] John Arnold: Uh, first the way that code is developed and the way that applications are developed. Um, and the second is the way that workflows and automations happen, um, inside companies, you know, in the, in the back office or in the front office and how automation works. And then a very distant third was, um, you know.

[00:03:11] John Arnold: The ability to create cat videos with the, without real cats being involved, you know, so, uh, you know, this content generation use case that a lot of people are talking about, uh, and I kind of always thought of those as separate things. You know, there’s kind of the coding world and there’s the automation world workflows and then, you know, and the cat videos and so, uh, but, but here comes Creatio and, and all of a sudden I’m realizing that this company is disrupting all three of those things in the same platform.

[00:03:38] John Arnold: So that was really transformational to my research. And also, um, just found it to be a, a great group of really smart people too. So, uh, so that’s how I ended up here. And, um, and there’s a lot of talk in the, in the media about ROI, the ROI of AI and, and how our companies achieving that.

[00:03:57] John Arnold: Um, the other thing that sort of caught my attention was the fact that the practitioners who are actually deploying AI agents in their marketing workflows, um, are seeing that ROI and it’s, it’s really clear. So, um, again, just super exciting times. I think we’re all living in a time where, um, you know, we’re gonna all remember what it was like to go to work before there were AI agents, and that’s pretty interesting stuff.

[00:04:23] Tessa Burg: Yeah, it is really interesting. You said something that when I think back in my career, used to be the opposite approach we would take in tech, which is a platform that’s doing everything at the, you know, in one platform. And I remember when I, even when I was on the client side and I was, uh, licensing tech and hiring agencies.

[00:04:47] Tessa Burg: The approach we took was we really want applications that do a specific thing very well. And you know, our CRM is going to be separate than our marketing database is going to be separate than how we create content. And even in agencies, we were like, well, we want agencies that do one thing really, really well, but we’re starting to see that the landscape is so crowded.

[00:05:13] Tessa Burg: And that when these applications in tech are all separate, it creates silos. They don’t all work well together and it puts the onus on the company then to connect them. And then if I make an update anywhere, God forbid, then I have to go and make sure I’m maintaining. Sort of this beast of a technology.

[00:05:34] Tessa Burg: Is that a challenge that Creatio saw and are there other challenges that it’s solving so that marketers can work more efficiently and get their arms around really empowering the experience instead of spending so much time trying to make sure all the things are connected.

[00:05:56] John Arnold: That’s such an awesome example of, you know, old paradigm versus new paradigm, and there’s so many things that are transformational that are happening now, and that’s why, um, you know, when I introduce this topic to audiences, if I’m speaking like I am at no-code days right now, uh, at this hotel where I’m, I’m, uh, speaking at a conference, um, I introduced this as one of the most important and powerful business strategies to emerge in our generation because there’s so many things that when you get down into it.

[00:06:24] John Arnold: Um, they’re not just transforming, you know, the, the technology, but it’s really the way we work and the way AI works with humans and a lot of that, so. You know, what you mentioned about the, the age old problem, I guess, or the, at least, you know, uh, old era problem of do I buy one platform that does it all or do I kind of build the microtech stack or do I assemble a lot of best of breed solutions and, and stitch them together, or do I do some kind of hybrid of those two approaches so you can get a little bit of the best of, and a little bit of the end-to-end platform.

[00:06:57] John Arnold: You know, that’s been a struggle for companies for a long time. Do I, you know, have one center of the universe and, and what is that? Or do I, you know, build all of these applications? So that’s kind of the old problem. The new problem is really, um, customization or composability. So instead of, you know, let’s go shopping for a vendor that has everything that I need and probably either doesn’t have everything that I need or has way too much, right?

[00:07:23] John Arnold: So there’s some. Uh, problem with, uh, buying too much technology. And that happens, for example, in industry CRM. So a lot of industries, they buy a horizontal CRM, it has way too many functions and capabilities. They’re paying for all of that, even though they don’t use them or they have low adoption of those features, or they buy the point solution.

[00:07:39] John Arnold: And the point solution because it’s a smaller company and doesn’t have, you know, the scale and everything, they don’t have enough features. And then to customize that or to change that or to right-size that for the business is super expensive. You need an army of developers and lots of time. You know, effort to try to get that to work.

[00:07:57] John Arnold: Um, so enter the world of AI and no-code, and when AI and no-code come together, you’re able to compose the application. So you can start with either, you can start with the kind of all in one approach and kind of scale it back to your needs and, you know, only build the applications that you need within that architecture.

[00:08:15] John Arnold: Or you can go with the best of breed. And, uh, you can compose all of the applications that fit your business model, uh, as exactly as you want to do that. And you can do that with a lot less resource and much faster because you can employ programs like Citizen Development or No-Code Developers. Or you can use, uh, more junior developers to handle some of your business cases or applications that aren’t enterprise grade and like, have lots and lots of complexity.

[00:08:45] John Arnold: Um, and you can use your professional developers to build the more complex, um, enterprise grade solutions and sort of separate those workforces and, and get exactly what you need. And a lot of people are calling that sort of the death of software as a service. You know, software as a service was, um, I’m going to wait for my software provider to develop a capability.

[00:09:06] John Arnold: And they have a roadmap and they have priorities and some things get developed and some things don’t get developed. And you know, if you’re on the receiving end of that, you kind of have to get what you get. And maybe you’re even on the customer advisory board and you have some input into what gets developed and what doesn’t get developed if you’re a big customer.

[00:09:21] John Arnold: And that’s totally out the door because now. If you don’t have it, you just build it yourself, you know, if you want to on a no-code platform. Um, so it really is disrupting, you know, not only, not only the software as a service market, but this whole idea of how do I rightsize my technology to fit the use cases that my business needs.

[00:09:41] Tessa Burg: Yeah. It’s funny when you were talking, I had like some PTSD when Salesforce ran a campaign and it was called 1-800-NO-CODE. And it was all about how when you sign up you don’t need any developers to help execute it. And at the time I was on the engineering side and developer side of the world and a client of mine I was freelancing, got Salesforce and told me how awesome it was.

[00:10:08] Tessa Burg: And I got attended. One sales meeting, had no opportunity to do any tech inspection, but the end result was, it required a lot of freaking code. To do what the client wanted to do. And there was, there was a com, you know, awesome, great go to market and they sold directly in to executives and people who can like hear the story.

[00:10:31] Tessa Burg: So when we talk about. Uh, no code today and the ability to not have to wait for SaaS to be able to make it work for yourself. Like how are you showing marketers that possibility and what makes this story real?

[00:10:48] John Arnold: Yeah. Well that’s interesting because, you know, first of all, there’s a lot of confusion around what no code and low code is, and um, even, uh, you see it used in the same sentence, like it’s a slash word, low code, no code.

[00:11:02] John Arnold: It’s one thing. Um, but actually the way we think about that at Creatio is, it’s, it’s two separate things. So, um, I’ll give you an example. I, I started out my career in, um, in email marketing. And back in those days, you know, if you wanted to build an email. You had to know HTML and CSS because there was no way to build an email that had pictures and colors and, and design without knowing how to code.

[00:11:24] John Arnold: So you had to be, um, you know, a software coder to be able to do that. And then a little bit later on, you know, email marketing platforms came out. And, uh, so you know, the idea of low code is really nothing new because those email, uh, creator tools were all low code platforms, right? You could go in and create the email yourself.

[00:11:44] John Arnold: You could drag and drop some of the elements of the email around and you could access the code. And, you know, if you knew a little bit of JavaScript or HTML, that would help you to do some further customization. That was really nice. Um, but that was still sort of like for developers who are maybe more junior or just people who have some, some coding skills.

[00:12:01] John Arnold: And you see the same thing with some of the legacy platforms where they call it no code, but it’s only no code up to a point. At some point, probably pretty early in the development of an application, you’re going to need to want to access the code. And a lot of times that’s because they have their own specialized languages like Apex for example.

[00:12:17] John Arnold: You know you’re gonna need to know how to use Apex ’cause that’s a domain specific language, um, that’s important to that platform itself. And if you don’t know that specific language, you’re gonna struggle or you’re only gonna be able to take it so far. So that’s an example of what we call pro code or low code.

[00:12:32] John Arnold: When it gets to true no-code and really being a no-code platform, uh, that’s where, you know, the drag and drop elements and all of the, um, experiences come into play. And, uh, you know, you, you can actually, um, assign or democratize the building of applications. To business users or people who don’t have any, uh, coding experience at all.

[00:12:56] John Arnold: And of course, there’s code behind the scenes, right? So the word no code doesn’t really mean there’s no code anywhere. It’s behind the scenes and it’s being, uh, coded behind the scenes. Um, but when you combine that with AI, this is when it gets really interesting. So moving beyond the idea of, you know, drag and drop interfaces and being able to, uh, create things by pointing and clicking.

[00:13:17] John Arnold: But now, being able to design and build applications with natural language. So, um, sort of like just speaking the apps into existence and, uh, vibe coding, if you will. Right? So starting out with some sort of minimally viable application and simple, and then continuing to use natural language to, uh, build out the application.

[00:13:37] John Arnold: All the while the AI agents are actually coding behind the scenes. That’s a whole new level of operability where you kind of get rid of the whole idea of a user interface and um, you know, anyone in their own natural language, whatever language your large language model supports can build those applications.

[00:13:56] John Arnold: Uh, what that means for IT, of course is, you know, do you want to turn everybody into a citizen no-code developer or do you want to continue to keep that inside the IT organization and just, uh, create a, a. A landscape where it, uh, doesn’t have to do application development for some smaller use cases. Um, but there’s some oversight, uh, or maybe again, you wanna democratize that and you wanna let business users build some of their own applications.

[00:14:25] John Arnold: You can maybe have a center of excellence around that or, um, enable those teams in some way to do some of that themselves and have some self service around it.

[00:14:34] Tessa Burg: Yeah. What I love about the democratization of coding and allowing marketers to speak an application into existence. It really is not about going around the developers or going around the IT department.

[00:14:51] Tessa Burg: It’s about moving application creation closer to the point of expertise. And it’s why I got into marketing. I was so fascinated by data and trying to really under deeply understand what drives behaviors and. When I was on the client side, and I know I use American Greetings a lot as an example, but when we wanted to build an application or get something new done, we had to enter a ticket, and then we had to get in line and wait till our developers were ready.

[00:15:26] Tessa Burg: Then we got to get into the vicious, fun cycle of writing requirements. It coming back, not quite what it is. Let’s try again. Let’s do this. Well now months have gone by. I waited. I tried to write the requirements and then as anyone who worked with me knows, sometimes I built the application myself and launched it with without permission and definitely got yelled at.

[00:15:45] Tessa Burg: But it created this weird tension between the marketing and the tech side. And it had everything to do with when you’re an in-house developer engineer, how can you be an expert in the tech that you’re building for the company and the way in which you’re serving those digital products, or perhaps software as a service, and also the way that you need to use completely different tech to get that product into market?

[00:16:16] Tessa Burg: And I love, love. This theme of empowering marketers to now have a tool that brings their area of expertise, their skills to life. And you know, my perspective, it doesn’t really take away from the engineers. The engineers are already busy. And if anything, and expedites the value the company’s able to deliver.

[00:16:41] Tessa Burg: And relevant timing is everything in marketing. Um. So I love this approach, but what have you heard from your customers? Like what are some of the other challenges or the ahas they’re having when they’re like, okay, this is why Creatio makes sense for us, and is there any pushback that it’s not a Salesforce or not one of the larger platforms that I think companies just feel more comfortable buying.

[00:17:12] John Arnold: Yeah, I think you hit on one of the big ones, which is that relationship between the marketing team and the IT team and you know, yeah. In the old world, uh, marketing says I need a dashboard. And so you go to it and you say, I need a dashboard, please. And, um, you know, there’s lots of pushback, there’s lots of questions you what is this dashboard for and who’s gonna maintain it?

[00:17:31] John Arnold: And. Where’s the data gonna come from and who has access to it? And are you the only one who needs this dashboard? Or do more people need this dashboard? Right? Let’s do some discovery. Um, and those are great questions and you need to have that kind of tension, um, and, and those safeguards so that you don’t waste resources.

[00:17:46] John Arnold: Um, but in the, in the new world of no-code and AI, IT really does have that choice, right, to say, well, you know, one option would be to, uh, for some level of use cases, democratize or, you know, turn that into a self-service program where we say you want your own dashboard in the CRM. Go ahead. It’s, you know, that’s a, that’s a use case that qualifies for that self-service motion.

[00:18:10] John Arnold: And, and here we are. If, if you need any help, you know, we can help you out with that. Um, or you might decide, well, you know, we still. Create the ticket and the ticket comes in. But that process totally changes. So now we’re gonna go sit with that end user and watch them, uh, speaking to the AI and have a conversation about what they need and, and, uh, maybe even read the transcript of the conversation with the AI and try to find out more about what these business users are really trying to achieve with their, with their, um, with their applications.

[00:18:41] John Arnold: You might even create a center of excellence around that with some best practices or, you know, try to talk to them about, um, ways to do things because look, it just because you’re doing, um, application development in a new way. It doesn’t mean you throw away all of the rules around application development.

[00:18:58] John Arnold: You still need to test it. You still need to make sure the data is working. You still need to produce it in a sandbox environment before it goes live. And you know, you have a whole application development lifecycle that you need to manage so that you can update it and you know where all the applications are being built and all that.

[00:19:14] John Arnold: So all that still doesn’t, um, that doesn’t just get thrown away because people are are vibe coding. Um. But you may also decide because of those, uh, those, uh, particulars, you might need to have more of a fusion team approach, right? So, um, you know, you still take the ticket, you still do that requirements document.

[00:19:33] John Arnold: You still have those conversations, and you still have professional developers involved. But the pace at which you can develop those applications and the speed at which you can get that first minimally viable, um, product out the door is so much faster that, you know, instead of prototyping or the user inter interface getting in the way of the functionality of the application.

[00:19:53] John Arnold: You can actually build a version one of the application very quickly, and that can be the test model that the, a business user can go back and iterate and, you know, just start working with the application and get it right so that you’re not doing all the back and forth so that you have to, you know, measure twice and cut once.

[00:20:12] John Arnold: Um, so all of that is, is again, just a, a new way of working and, um. For some organizations, it allows them to free up some of their greater technical resources. So if you have, you know, professional developers with lots of experience and lots of skill, you can deploy them, uh, on bigger projects that are more end-to-end outcomes and building very complex.

[00:20:34] John Arnold: Um. Enterprise level applications that really differentiate your business. And those are high value use cases. And then you can take maybe, let’s say your junior developers or new developers that you’re hiring in their first role. Um, and you can put them kind of in the middle of helping out with some of the enterprise level applications and learning and growing, but also helping out with some of the use cases that are a little bit smaller and more core to the business and help those business users.

[00:20:59] John Arnold: Um, and then you’d have some level of. Uh, citizen development going on where there’s a center of excellence that’s just enabling people to do it themselves. And that’s a whole new paradigm that, you know, it’s not a change in the number of resources that you have, um, or the way that you’re spending your IT budget.

[00:21:14] John Arnold: It’s just, um, it’s not a reduction in your IT budget rather. Um, but it’s a different way to deploy those IT resources so that you maximize the value of the high, you know, the highly valued resources compared to the things that just keep the business running. But. You know, are more, uh, rinse and repeat.

[00:21:33] Tessa Burg: Yeah. I, I absolutely love that. And sometimes, you know, everyone at Mod Op hears me say this, that all marketers need to take some basic data science and some basic product management and UX/UI classes because to build great applications and for us all to have and understand the context around the words that we’re using.

[00:21:54] Tessa Burg: We need to be a little bit more generalist in the types of skills we have. So you might be deep in marketing, but what I love about this, bringing a team of different skills together. Sometimes when our experience is so different, we’re saying the same words, but based on our experience and context, we’re projecting different meanings on them.

[00:22:12] Tessa Burg: And so again, what you are allowing is the marketer creates something. Once something is created, we all better understand what the objective is, how it’s gonna add value to our business and to the customer. And that measurement that you just mentioned, that this isn’t necessarily less people, but this is, these are people working more productively together.

[00:22:39] Tessa Burg: And you’re not basing the success of AI and how much headcount you can cut, but rather on how much value you can create per head in a shorter amount of time. And like I feel like that’s the biggest difference is in we’re you’re building bridges, bringing folks together, giving them this opportunity to even learn new skills, build new skills, create a new way of working.

[00:23:08] Tessa Burg: And that is gonna be extremely necessary as AI continues to accelerate.

[00:23:13] John Arnold: Yeah. I’m so glad you said that, because a lot of companies see this as a threat to the jobs or the hours or, you know, people will be working less or they’ll be more productive with the hours that they have, and that’s really kind of missing the whole point.

[00:23:25] John Arnold: Right? The whole point is that when people in AI work together, you get a greater outcome and you get something that you didn’t have before. You know, it’s like the one plus one equals three kind of a scenario. And, um, how are you deploying those hours and how are you deploying those, uh, those human resources becomes the root of the problem, uh, or the root of the, of the ROI.

[00:23:46] John Arnold: And, you know, the companies that are gonna win in this market are going to be the ones that use humans really, really effectively for what they’re the best at, which is, you know, connecting with the customer and building the relationships and understanding the business value and how you’re competing against substitutes or competitors in the market and, and how you’re gonna use your resources effectively to do that.

[00:24:07] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I love that. So I wanna round back on a question. I asked halfway, but it’s because I think a lot of our clients are thinking this in the back of their head. How, how can enterprises engage with a platform like Creatio if they feel like they’re already too steeped in a legacy platform? Like, and I’ll just, you know, like a Salesforce or a Hubspotter, a comfortable platform.

[00:24:36] Tessa Burg: I feel like a lot of our clients right now in the back of their heads are thinking. Do I add this on? Is this a replacement? Is this really built and secure enough for a company of our size? If we’re a Fortune 100, 500, fortune 1000 company?

[00:24:54] John Arnold: Yeah, it’s a great question and the way that we position that, and this is the way that all technology decision makers are really positioned, is that a lot of those legacy platforms are very entrenched in the business.

[00:25:04] John Arnold: So that’s a reality is that, you know, those, those platforms have done a really good job of engrossing themselves in the business and really attaching and becoming critical. Uh, and they’re really monolithic as well. They, you know, they’re tapped into so many different things that it’s really hard to extract some of those things, even if it’s useful to the business or beneficial to them. There’s definitely some, um, some challenges with pulling it out or extracting that, or even changing, making changes, significant changes to it.

[00:25:32] John Arnold: Um, so what, what the reality is is that you have a choice. You have the choice of either waiting for legacy modernization because the legacy platforms are modernizing, they’re investing millions and millions of dollars in lots of investment in transferring from the legacy architectures over to more modern architectures.

[00:25:49] John Arnold: And that has a significant cost and it’s gonna take a significant amount of time. Um, so you can wait that out and they’ll get there, you know, eventually over years and years and millions and millions of dollars, they’ll end up modernizing and they’ll have that sort of AI native architecture that they built from the ground up.

[00:26:06] John Arnold: Um, or you can cut over to the new era sooner. And you know, there’s a real benefit in doing that. Um, for one thing, you’re going to get the new capabilities right away, so you don’t have to wait years for those capabilities. Um, and you’re also going to be in control of some of that, those changes. So one of the biggest pain points with legacy changes is that when the legacy architecture has to be updated.

[00:26:31] John Arnold: You kind of don’t, maybe you don’t even see it coming, but sometimes you see it coming. But the amount of change that it creates, um, is very expensive. And it’s sort of like whiplash to have to deploy a whole bunch of technical resources to pivot and change so you’re not ripping the whole thing out, but you’re definitely experiencing a lot of pain to, to make some of those modernization changes.

[00:26:52] John Arnold: Um, if you cut over to the new era. Then when those changes happen, you’re on a no-code platform with AI native at the core. So you know those changes. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to make any changes or make any pivots, but when things change, if the markets change, if the technology changes or gets updated, um, it’s just much simpler and easier.

[00:27:11] John Arnold: But it’s also, um, more nimble and agile so you can make the changes quickly without as much resource. Um, and so you’re really more in control of how you want to. Whereas on the other hand, you’re, you’re really not in control at all. Uh, one possibility also is to, uh, have a co-deployment. So, you know, a lot of companies will deploy Creatio as an engagement layer or as the orchestration layer in the, in the ecosystem of technologies.

[00:27:44] John Arnold: Then, um, you know, connect everything together because that’s sort of what the legacy platforms are doing. They’re having to, you know, layer things on top of other things. So they layer the AI on top and then they charge for it. And then they layer, um, you know, some sort of a no-code platform or a modern database.

[00:28:00] John Arnold: They connect them together and they’re all kind of different pieces of the puzzle that are all bolted together, and they’re going to eventually slowly migrate those together or rebuild them. So that it’s sort of unified. Um, and so you can kind of do the same thing by just, you know, taking the Creatio platform as the orchestration layer and doing your own connecting and uh, and then slowly migrate things over.

[00:28:21] John Arnold: And that way you have more control. And a lot of times you can reduce the license fees on some of those legacy platforms while you’re doing that. To kind of rightsize the budget for that and make it less painful than, you know, dare I say a rip and replace scenario where people have to rip out the old and put in the new and, and that’s very disruptive.

[00:28:39] Tessa Burg: Yeah, I think that was a great answer. And if I were to summarize it, there is no silver bullet. Like there’s no one answer. Every company is different and there’s a framework we use that I will just offer up. So the listeners and it’s people, then process them possibility. But one thing for certain is the new era and the new way of doing marketing is happening now.

[00:29:06] Tessa Burg: And so the necessity to have developers, IT leaders on the same team with your marketers, that engineering power behind the way you deliver products and experiences. Is happening. And if you start with people first and look at what are the skills and move to process and identify where are points of tension, what’s the cost of those points of tension?

[00:29:32] Tessa Burg: Where are opportunities, what’s the opportunity and potential growth and revenue that we’ll get from working on those opportunities? And then you move to the what’s possible that will help each company. Determine what tech supports those possibilities and growth. But I love that you gave those three different lanes.

[00:29:51] Tessa Burg: ’cause that is a jumping off point when you get to possibility. But like everything, uh, AI is solving a lot of problems, but it’s introducing new challenges and new things for us to come together on and solve as businesses and with our clients.

[00:30:10] John Arnold: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned the people process thing because, um, you know, a lot of companies start out with, well, let’s buy the technology, and then what does the technology do?

[00:30:21] John Arnold: Let’s do that.

[00:30:22] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:22] John Arnold: Um, so for example, you know, you buy an account-based marketing platform and the account-based marketing platform allows you to target business own people who own, uh, or, or work for a business. And you can target those people with advertising. So yeah, we’ve never done that before.

[00:30:35] John Arnold: Let’s do that because that’s what the technology does. And you know, in that case you probably get some pretty good value. Um, but when it comes to monolithic platforms that have a lot of complexity and you start off with let’s buy the, the solution and, um, and figure it out later, um, you run into that complexity and it gets really difficult.

[00:30:55] John Arnold: And so you know, the common practice is to say, well, you shouldn’t have started with the technology. Let’s start with the people. Let’s look at what the customer journey is like. Let’s look at your users and your marketers and your salespeople and figure out what their day-to-day looks like. And then let’s work backwards from there and develop the customer journey that we want and develop all that.

[00:31:12] John Arnold: Well, then they run into the monolithic platform again because the thing that they wish they could do with their customer journey and their users either isn’t possible or is too expensive or takes too long, or they don’t have the expertise or the funds to do it.

[00:31:26] John Arnold: And so they do all these workarounds and patchwork to try to get it to work and it never quite works. Um, and you know, now in the new era. You’re able to actually skip over this whole idea of, well, what does the technology do? The technology will do whatever you want it to do, and the cost is probably reasonable compared to the ROI that you’re gonna get from it.

[00:31:47] John Arnold: So now when the technology’s out of the way, you can go back to focusing on the people and the process, and you can be more assured if you’ve been burned before. That when you start from that customer journey and work backwards, that you’re gonna actually be able to realize the functionality and the capabilities that will power that customer journey.

[00:32:04] John Arnold: Whereas before it’s like, well, you know, we tried, but the customer, you know, the platform never ended up doing what we needed it to do. Uh, and now it will.

[00:32:12] Tessa Burg: Yeah. So John, we are already at time, but No worries. We have a whole other episode that we’re going to record and we’re gonna be jumping into the future of B2B marketing and advertising.

[00:32:25] Tessa Burg: This call or this podcast interview, we really focused on what that collaboration looks like with different people coming to the table to deliver that value and the process to make these decisions. And these are bold, big decisions, more accessible. And we hope that, you know, as a client, as someone listening, don’t get intimidated.

[00:32:45] Tessa Burg: Yes, you have to make a bold decision, but starting at a simple place of who do you have? What are those points of tension? Where’s your opportunity? As marketers, we’re very used to starting off at that process. And our next episode, we’ll dive deep into some research on more coworkers that might be showing up to your collaboration, agents, and what is the future of ag agentic marketing and and automation look like.

[00:33:08] Tessa Burg: But until then, John, thank you so much for this conversation, and if listeners want to find you, how can they do that?

[00:33:15] John Arnold: Thank you again. I appreciate, uh, having me and I’m glad I’m gonna gonna come back. That’ll be awesome. I was, enjoyed my conversation. It went really fast and uh, yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn.

[00:33:25] John Arnold: Just find me on LinkedIn, John Arnold at Creatio.

[00:33:28] Tessa Burg: Perfect. And if you wanna hear more episodes of Leader Generation, you can find them at modop.com. That’s modop.com or anywhere you listen to podcasts. And until next time, John, enjoy your travels.

[00:33:44] John Arnold: You too. Talk to you again soon.