[00:00:00] Matt Duench: Welcome to Mistaken Identity. I'm Matt Duench. Today, I'll interview Sophie Crosby, who's co founder of Paso Consulting, a former CMO at Ticketmaster, Senior Vice President of Product at Salesforce, and a VP of Marketing at LiveNation. She'll explain how marketers can leverage identity data to build amazing customer experiences and trust with their end users over time.

[00:00:23] Welcome everyone to the Mistaken Identity Podcast. I'm Matt Duench, host of the show, and I'm very excited to be joined today by Sophie Crosby, who's the Co Founder of Paso Consulting. Sophie, welcome to the show.

[00:00:35] Sophie Crosby: Well, thanks for having me. I'm very excited. Um, uh, and it's the first time I've ever done a really serious setup. I've got a microphone, headphones and everything. It's a proper, serious, high quality podcast. It's good to be on.

[00:00:46] Matt Duench: Well, that's excellent. And I'm really excited to have someone with your background on the show today, who's spent some time in product. Spend some time in marketing, but maybe let's, for the listeners of the show, dive into a bit of your experience. Tell us what's brought you here and, uh, and really, you know, we'll do a little bit of a background on your career.

[00:01:03] Sophie Crosby: Wow. Okay. So, um, I started out my career, whisper it, over 30 years ago. Um, and, uh, I'd done Spanish and English joint honours at University in Nottingham. Uh, I'd lived in Spain for a couple of years in Madrid. I absolutely loved it. I had a wild time working in nightclubs, uh, cleaning offices, um, and also translating, um, films, uh, for overdubbing in Spanish. So I did lots of different things and I absolutely adored it. And, uh, Madrid particularly holds a very special place in my heart. But I started my first music industry job, I suppose, that was really serious, was at EMI uh, that was in 1993, I was on the 5th floor of the International Department, I was the only person with a computer on my desk. And, I told a white lie. I said I knew WordStar to get the job. And I didn't, uh, so I had spent most of my time with a massive book on my lap under the desk, looking up, you know, how to do things, um, uh, on, on this keyboard. Um, then I went, uh, through Chrysalis. Um, I went over to, and a small label called This Way Up Records, I ended up at V2 Records and I started off there in international production and I built in, and if you can remember this, Lotus Notes, an international release management system and workflow process so we could release across different regions and markets with different tracks and do different things and make sure we had all the pieces in place to make records and release them in the right place. Um, I learned a lot about... Building software and a lot and thought, well, that's one thing, um, you know, defining it's one thing building. It's another, but actually bringing people along with you. Adoption, driving adoption. That is actually, and in fact, you know, with all technology since then that I've worked with, I've realized the technology has this value and the data, of course, that you put into it is extraordinarily important, but the ability to drive adoption and get the value you seek, that's where you get the kind of X10 value from your investment.

[00:03:14] So lots of stuff about people and emotion. Yes, technology, but lots of people and emotion. What else? So then from V2, I then went to Sony Records and that was really interesting and I worked with, um, on albums like Ricky Martin and System of a Down and David Bowie's Heathen album. So that was super cool. Um, and I learned about being in a bigger company, you know, and how to activate different departments and, you know, you're not alone, you're kind of, you're activating the sales team and working with the street team, etc. Um, and from Sony. I've forgotten where I went from Sony. Where did I go after that?

[00:03:53] I've forgotten. Uh, I think that's when I went to live, uh, to Clear Channel.ClearChannel became LiveNation, LiveNation was taken over by Ticketmaster, and I spent, probably across those three, 15 years of my career, and it was an extraordinary 15 years, and I think the most transformative part, at LiveNation, lots of things about building festival websites, oh my god, in the early 2000s, maybe around 2005, we were creating a big metal festival called Download, and we spent ages building a video upload platform for fans to upload their videos and then we'd approve them. We figured it all out and just as we're about to launch it, YouTube launched with a plugin and we're like, oh, all right. Yeah, so build versus buy, you know, and it shows you that in tech as in life, timing is everything, right? So that's kind of interesting.At Ticketmaster, I think that was the most transformative role I had, uh, seven and a half years, more or less there as CMO, Head of Data Insight. There was a point in 2012 where the Head of IT left the company and I had been a very, very difficult and demanding internal customer. Um, I mean, I was... I must have been a nightmare and um, because I wanted my data. I wanted my customer data. I wanted it in good order. I wanted it consented. I wanted it compliant. I wanted it in the tools. Because I was running a, um, an international HQ for marketing. So I wanted to deliver that to 18 marketers or marketing teams in 18 markets. Um, and, uh, you know, make them feel confident. And I knew that we had extraordinary data. You know, the tickets that people buy, that tells you a lot. Think about the affinities and the propensity scores you can create. Think about amazing things like calculating distance to venue. You know, there's no point in me trying to sell you a ticket for a gig in Glasgow tomorrow night. Because... You're somewhere in Canada, right? So like knowing where somebody lives and where the event is was important. So there was lots of things I wanted to do, and I knew it could be very powerful to help us plan events, sell tickets more efficiently, book events, go to, uh, customer to clients and say, look what, how we can help you sell your tickets. So, um, when the head of it left a friend of mine on the, um, executive team said to the president, why don't you just give that team, that data warehousing team and that insight team to Sophie and, um.

[00:06:12] You know, then she'll just shut up. She'll be her own, you know, she'll be her own internal supplier and it was extraordinary, um, and I think what that managed to achieve in one fell swoop, I tripped over my shoelaces into what I now advocate to business leaders as the model, because it's about shared goals, shared outcomes, shared KPIs, real alignment of roadmap, of purpose, of outcomes, and the ability to share resources and headcount.

[00:06:45] Um, uh, which is, you know, the collaborative model is really the way to get, uh, big projects and the transformative projects. We see customers, um, clients now, you know, big companies trying to do. That's the way to get things moving, cross functional teams. So. I was really lucky, I tripped over my own shoelaces into it, really. Um, and then, yeah, yeah, and then, and then I went to Salesforce. Um, Bob Stutz, uh, at that point was running Salesforce and, um. I think I had been a difficult and demanding client of Salesforce Marketing Cloud as well. I know I was. I really wanted to squeeze the, you know, squeeze the technology till the pip squeaked. I wanted to make it work for me. I wanted to get, it was expensive and I wanted to get my value. And I wanted my, my marketers in all the countries to get that value as well. So. I think that again, it was a bit like, Oh, she's so noisy and difficult. If we just employ her, maybe we can get some benefit. And, um, so for four years, I was, um, senior vice president of outbound product for marketing cloud, um, and really carved out a role in talking to strategic leaders at companies who were using Marketing Cloud, helping them think about and inspire them really on how they could capture more value from their investment, but also connecting across all of the product teams, which for Marketing Cloud are in lots of different places around the world.

[00:08:07] And helping explain and sort of demystify the complex product set to internal, uh, uh, partners in the field sales and services, but also partners, et cetera. So, I loved it. I loved it. It was a great role. And now, since then, I had a career break, um, for a while. And now, um, yeah, I got bored and lonely. And I thought... I better set something up. So I've set up Paso. I'm doing some good fun work with you guys. In Sweden, I'm going to be hosting a virtual roundtable with Scandinavian Airlines in Sweden in a couple of weeks. I just did a keynote at a DevOps, I couldn't believe it, a DevOps conference yesterday. I think they wanted somebody who wasn't DevOps. So I'm enjoying the work that I'm doing at the minute. I'm having to piece it together though, and that's a big challenge when you've worked in companies to figure out how to piece together your own career in that way.

[00:09:04] Matt Duench: and that's awesome. And you touched on a few things that we love to cover in the show, obviously around identity, right? Knowing a little bit more about your customers. You uh, and also what I found really interesting is you mentioned creating demand, driving demand as you're building, you know, software and building SaaS and products is thinking about how you drive demand. I want to, I want to dive into that a little bit more, even from, from your product background, you know, how, how have you seen that change, uh, over, over your career in terms of how you think about building products, what you need to consider, what goes into building really great experiences with those products?

[00:09:38] Thanks.

[00:09:38] Sophie Crosby: Gosh. Well, products usually come out of a need. Somebody says, my God, if only, if only this, what if? Products come out of what if. What if I could take that data and do this and make that data actionable and put it in the hands of my marketers? That was my what if at Ticketmaster. I wanted to put actionable data into the hands of marketers. So I think product always comes out of a what if. But I think then if you're not careful and you don't really have that good collaboration and also, most importantly, an exceptionally clear vision, well articulated with empowered teams who really understand it's not just a logo or a strapline, it's a reality that vision and people have internalized it.

[00:10:22] They understand what that means. It's, it's easy perhaps sometimes for exceptionally talented technical teams, uh, you know, engineers and even product people as well themselves to take that what if away and go build it and, and build it right. But then they go and find them once they launch it, they realize they didn't build the right thing. They built it right, but they didn't build the right thing, you know, because once it gets out into the wild, people are like, well, I didn't ask for this and this isn't what I wanted. Um, so. I think that alignment with the business is, is as, as important as ever. 

[00:10:58] I came across a really interesting company in belgium they were kind of a recruitment company and I have forgotten their name now So embarrassing. Sorry, if you're listening to this and it was your company And what they did was they had a kind of an employee communications team that numbered about 150 people out of only a company of about 2, 000. And these guys were, um, they, they basically used them as their first line testers, you know, on everything. Um, and got very honest, gritty feedback on anything that they did as a company. And that wasn't just software, it was other, other things, you know, maybe they might bring a... Freedom Fridays, or I don't know, Wear What You Want Wednesdays, or whatever, you know, but they, they made sure that this team really gave them very gritty feedback, and that they included them in quite high level, um, strategic discussions, and did kind of World Cafe style stuff with them, and, um, and they were almost like union representatives, if you like, uh, for want of a better description, and, um, And I think that's really important.

[00:12:05] A lot of people don't like change, and software and bringing in new technology is often about change. And it's often about changing people's roles quite radically, sometimes in an extraordinary way. You know, I mean, when Ikea bought in their Billy bot, named after their famous bookcase, you know, um, that made a lot of customer service advisors, um, You know, effectively redundant. But what they did, what I love about IKEA is they took those about 2, 000 staff and they retrained them on being interior designers, right? So that they could do digital consultations using software and helping people think about how they either wanted to do their kitchen or design their living room and how color and rugs and symmetry would work. And I think that's extraordinary. So, you know, I think it's also about new technology, we know, can also unlock new possibilities for all of us, you know, who wants to do, spend half your life doing a really dull, repetitive task, if technology can help you do it faster, it can free you to do more interesting things in that role, but sometimes that's hard to take on, um, that change, so I think it's the people and the emotion and the culture and the, oh gosh, it's such a trendy things say, but kind of psychological safety of those people who are taking on that new and to be able to, um, express what's going on with them and, and, and to try and address those things. Yeah.

[00:13:32] Matt Duench: Absolutely. And I mean, even in your role currently, I mean, you're, you're obviously very focused on connecting marketing and technology. And data, as you mentioned, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what, you know, why you're so passionate about, about that, about connecting all of those together.

[00:13:48] Sophie Crosby: Look. Marketing for so, I'm a marketer really at heart, but I love technology and I love what technology can do and I love working with people who are super clever technologists. Um, And I love being delighted and surprised by new things technology can do. Um, but marketing, for example, has changed arguably more in the last three years then it has in the previous 30. I mean, uh, you know, I'm frankly overwhelmed by the balkanization of communities and channels and platforms, you know, um, uh, what many marketers as well have relied on over the last decade, which is really third party cookies. And, you know, having to being able to stitch together data or at least understand audiences in a way that really makes large scale advertising spend, uh, much more efficient. That's all going to go away. It's pretty terrifying right now. Customer acquisition costs are going through the roof. Everybody's being told AI is going to steal their job. So, um, you know, I think, how do you, why am I passionate about this? Because I know it's going to affect everything.

[00:14:52] And the area that I'm most interested in is marketing. But I think marketing, technology and operations, you know, for many companies, that's a real crux and you have to understand all three of those. It's... It's a bit like, you know, whether you like reading superhero novels or Jack Reacher things, you know, no man or woman is an island and, you know, anything really worth doing, you're not going to do it on your own. You're not. Um, you know, marketers and CMOs need to become much more like almost functional CTOs. They have to learn. The data and the technology that's going to help them drive the growth they seek. But CTOs and CIOs and CISOs, they have to really understand and know that they're almost a servant of the business. That they have to understand what marketing needs to do and how it's working. They have to understand the customer service team or the finance team or whoever they're serving internally. So for me, it's the sort of marketing technology operations. Um, for somebody else, it might be marketing and, uh, and the CFO, the office of the CFO and, you know, and accounting, right? But it's, it's, it's about that collaboration between the three and that, um, really the businesses that are, there's a lot of businesses that are not going to survive the next decade. They're just not and they're maybe starting to see or they started to see the wheels coming off, but they think it's okay and they're trying to cut costs and they're trying to do things the way they always did. Um, some of them are maybe bringing into new technology, but maybe 30 percent of them are just failing utterly into in doing that. That's why I'm passionate because there's some amazing businesses that really, I would love to see surviving and thriving. 

[00:16:34] Matt Duench: awesome. And you talked a little around obviously how, how much marketing has changed in the last three years, right? I mean, What do you think, what are some trends that you think have led to that, that there's been such astronomical change for marketers and how they have to think about marketing differently and that data that they collect, what, what are some big trends that you've seen? 

[00:16:54] Sophie Crosby: You know, if I go back 20 years and I wanted to do a big, a big impactful advert in the UK, you know, big impactful marketing campaign for a big product, you know, I would book the most expensive slot on TV, which was probably the advertising break in Coronation Street and on a big episode or EastEnders or something, you know, You know, if I wanted to hit a mass market audience and I'd spend an enormous amount on that TV spot but I'd know I'd hit people and then I'd back it up with things in print advertising, you know, how many people are buying newspapers now, um, you know, I'd back it up with things in magazines, ditto, I'd maybe, you know, so, so, you know, everything that I might have done, uh, certainly 15, 20 years and maybe even 10 years ago, has completely changed. Now, since then, then we had a kind of a ride. Um, you know, 12 to 10 years ago, it was all about email and we were all so excited and lots of email companies thought, Oh, yes, well, Sophie, Sophie Crosby is only ever going to have one email. So they set up their entire proposition. Of course, I don't know about you, I've probably got about four different, five different email addresses, right? So these singular identifiers don't really exist in the same way. Um, and marketers, you know, they're responsible for how a company shows up in the world. And yet we have a prolific, you know, there are communities now. Vulcanized communities. There's a community of people who like finger knitting. There's literally people who knit with their fingers, right? So, yeah, I mean, there's these highly specialized, you know, kind of pockets of people and communities and interests.

[00:18:25] And so for marketers, and I think over the last three years, video has become increasingly important. And it's now absolutely huge. So video, influencer marketing, absolutely exploding. Um, the capability now as well to kind of create video or variants of a piece of video content you've done with generative AI.

[00:18:46] So you might create one, but then create lots of variants. The idea, you know, so, um, the ability to spitball ideas, I think, with AI is lots of fun. Um, the idea, the ability to create some gen AI things and outputs is good. I think in the end for big brands, um, I don't know if you ever had this advert for Cadbury's chocolate, the gorilla playing the drums on, I can feel, you can, I can feel it coming in the air, Phil Collins. Um,

[00:19:14] Matt Duench: yes, yes, yes.

[00:19:16] Sophie Crosby: Huge advert for that chocolate bar years ago, and I'm a bit like, Cadbury should just stick with that, that's a great brand, you know, there's certain brand ads, you know, rather than kind of spending millions every year, every other year reinventing your brand, right, but it's the channels by which we really engage people that are becoming more important and I think marketers have to be very curious, they have to be prepared to dig down into communities and really get to know them and start to understand them and understand what they respond to and really create, um, quite distinctive layers of marketing campaigns in different ways. And I think, um. The disappearance of the third party cookie, of course, Google keeps kicking it into the long grass because an enormous amount of their revenue comes from that advertising. Um, but it is going away. We do all care more about our privacy. They're challenging times. And I think if I sat here and said, well, I know the answer to it all. Well, I would be in a, an extraordinary position of being able to combat command millions of pounds a week, you know, and I, I don't know the answer to all of it, but I do know as most marketers do the gathering, clean, secure. Compliant first party data is extraordinarily important. We've all seen that on retail sites, you know, 20 percent off if you just give us your email, right?

[00:20:37] And our permission to do something with it. And I'm happy to do that. The value exchange is good for me on that. The question then is, are they, is that marketing team able to follow up? Are they able to figure out what's the right moment, because in that moment that I'm purchasing for 20 percent off, they just need to get that, that conversion through, but what's the right moment then for them to follow up with me to ask me a little more? And what's the value exchange to do that? And I think marketers really want that capability in their hands. I think you, you would call it, and I think you, you enable this progressive profiling. I think that's a really important part of the marketers arsenal moving forward to start to really get deeper because as you start to look at the data processing capabilities that are now much more Available to marketers, not all companies, not all IT departments are making that available to marketers, but whether it's Databricks or Snowflake or Salesforce Data Cloud, the ability to actually store quite deep, resonant, important information, you know, whether it's a star scheme or how you do it about each customer, and then to be able to really serve them, that's going to be super important, super important moving forward.

[00:21:48] Matt Duench: The one thing I think that's really changed as well that you mentioned is the segmentation of how we used to actually market or advertise our products and services, right? Where we used to, we used to go to market with, you know, ads or any, any sort of media execution. And we would target profiles or segments, right, of people, demographics. So trying to hit, you know, a number of people to, to buy our products or services. And I think what's really changed for marketing is you kind of mentioned there. Is the, the demand for personalization, right? You, you and I, and everyone else who's a consumer will interact with the brand advice and buy products and services from that brand. If there is that value exchange, but that value exchange is really rooted, I think, in personalization. Um, what, and you talked about third party cookies going away and they need to collect more first party data. I'd love to unpack that a little more. So in terms of, in terms of marketers, what do you think holds marketers of today back from being able to build really great personalized, like deliver personalized services and build really strong customer profiles of, of their customers?

[00:22:55] Sophie Crosby: Um, the fact that they didn't trip over their shoelaces into a team with a, with a data, with a data engineering technology and product team, like I did, um, you know, they are, they are served usually, um, by another team in the company and, uh, historically, I think there's been a lot of tension and friction often between marketers and, and let's say, engineers or technologists. Uh, not always, but, um, I think the technology guys think the marketers are fun, but they reckon their job is all just, you know, as Dilbert says, liquor and guessing, um, uh, is his opinion of marketers. They just go to parties and drink and guess, um, and of course there is a lot of guessing. If you think about attribution, the great unicorn in the forest.

[00:23:37] You know, of, uh, which was the drink that gave me the hang at last night that gave me the hangover this morning. You know, was it the champagne at the start or the port at the end? Well, it was, it was everything in between as well. But, um, you see that whether it's from email marketing or whether it's from digital advertising or whether it's from something else, every channel sort of overestimating, if you like, their, the attribution to their channel.

[00:24:00] And that's really difficult. Um, so I think marketers are struggling with an enormous amount of information. Um, and often in frustration over the last 10, 15 years, they've gone off and they've got their own technology. So they've gone and got Hootsuite or Sprout or they've, uh, or probably for Google Analytics, they've worked with the product team to help deploy that. But maybe the product team weren't as aware of quite the, the, the metadata detail that, that marketing wanted or how they wanted to be able to use it because they were thinking about it more from how is my. There's a whole range of products with customer data in, whether it's, you know, reviews or whatever it might be, that marketers have, and yet many times they simply, these are just pots of data which are dead and sitting there and they can't access. And if they do go to their technology teams, it's a bit like, well, get to the back of the queue. You want that review data? You know, ingested and set against the customer record. That means we've got to go and put an analyst on it. We've got to do an ETL. We've got to do an extract, transform, load, and then we've got to check it. And then we'll have to set up a overnight feeds. And you know, how important really is it?

[00:25:11] How many more things is it going to sell? Well, it's that data and all the other data from all the other platforms. That's what the marketer is desperate for. And yet they they're really pendant on data engineers and data quality and data architects and teams that they don't have who are quite rightly busy doing lots of other incredibly important things for the business. And so there's a real frustration there. I mean, I've met big companies, big companies who'd say, you know, this, this marketing platform isn't working for me. And I said, well, talk me through, you know, how you send a campaign, maybe just an email campaign. And they'll say, well, first of all, we decide what we want our segment to be. And we send those parameters to the, to the engineering team or the IT team and then we wait for two weeks for the segment to come back and I go Okay, well, I think that's probably the first problem Because what you're getting back is a big, yeah, a big lump of dumb data. So you I can't even tie back, you know, like I I can't sort of tie it back I just see you know, I'm just uploading a rock and seeing how many pebbles it'll make and so it's it's I think it's, that's why I advocate for collaborative, aligned roadmaps between technology and marketing and customer experience.

[00:26:25] That's why I advocate for shared resourcing. You know, I think, like, companies are set up and executives are set up to sort of battle against each other to look, I'm going to do the best presentation in the QBR or the year end or whatever, or I've sold more than you or, right? And they are slightly set up to contend with each other. Um. But we actually need them to create a culture of being able to work in a much more project driven, matrixed way with really great vision and strong governance, but we really need to help them share resources and priorities across the different, um, priorities of the company overall. And I don't think, I think a lot of established companies find that very hard to do.

[00:27:08] Matt Duench: Think that's such a strong point as well. The point of collaboration across teams, because I think the point you made about data existing in silos is such a, it's such a critical one because for every marketer, that's exactly the challenge. It's not that they don't have the data. It's that it exists in so many different places. It's fragmented across the organization. That they can't, they can't extract it in a meaningful way to actually generate value and insight out of that data. What, and I think a lot of that comes from, you mentioned the marketing technology stack or the MarTech stack. What do you think, what are some things that marketers may be listening to this podcast that they should think about for how they can unify that data across their entire organization so that they can actually get it out and make some really great customer and personalization decisions?

[00:27:56] Thank you.

[00:27:57] Sophie Crosby: I think some very exciting things happening in technology. But my team at Ticketmaster created incredible, you know, affinity scores and, and, and, um, highly visual engaging apps where you could, um, explore audiences and look at aggregated data. And we have managed to put that, um, behind our single sign on so that everybody in the company could play with and understand, you know, things, no personal data in there at all, but really interesting, uh, uh, data about audiences and trends and propensities and affinities. Um, and that was actually useful for everybody, you know, people who were booking festival lineups to, you know, trying to figure out what, what kind of venue to put an artist into.

[00:28:35] So that was good fun. And I think. You know, for marketers now, they need to realize that Okta is not just about workforce sign on. Um, you know, it's, it's about incredible security. It's about getting a deterministic identity. And also you can just capture just that email with that 20 percent off offer. Um, but there are ways actually where rather than being dependent, you know, Oh God, I'm dependent on those guys in IT again. You know, those guys on the fifth floor, I hate them. They never do anything for me. Right. Like the, you know, these emotions exist in companies, you know, we can't help ourselves. We're tribal, right. Um, rather than sort of depending on them actually with Okta that IT department can enable. The marketing department to have much more agency and actually as a human being, you know, most living beings want agency.

[00:29:27] It's very important for freedom, freedom. It's a great concept, but agency to do what you want to do. You know, um, uh, I always feel very sad when I see dogs on leads in the park. I think, oh, give the thing some agency, you know, um. So, but the ability to say, right, so I've captured their email address for that 20 percent off, but now I can look at people like Sophie, I can see the items she bought, I can look at other people who bought items like that, and I can figure out when is the next best, you know, when's a really good time to ask her for some more information. You know, that she has a dog or that she walks in the rain and then I can sell her the raincoat or, you know, right, um, and to, to really figure out and that's progressive profiling, but to allow me to also as a marketer decide how that's going to pop up, what it's going to look like, what I'm going to collect and how and allow me to test and learn with that rather than it being a really The onerous process of giving product requirements and waiting and getting it back and testing it and then saying, well, it'd be another nine months before we can put that on the roadmap, really. Um, because time is of the essence. This is, like I say, existential right now. Your ability to market and use customer data well is super important. So I think that's really exciting. And I think the new concepts that we're hearing from different, uh, data processing platforms, let's call it, you know, like the snowflakes and the databricks and the, and the data clouds and there's many more, you know, and parity or whatever.

[00:30:53] The ability to do zero copy data. So if I actually realize there's a marketer that the ESP I use also uses snowflake. So obviously in my ESP, I need all my click and open and engagement data. But if actually it could just be zero copied over. To, to our instance of, of, of that data platform, right? And if, uh, you know, and maybe actually there are other teams in the company that have got data, maybe from, uh, finance or like who's paying their subscriptions on time, who's on a three month subscription and who's on a five year subscription. That tells me something about that person and how I might market to them. 

[00:31:31] I think there's a lot more speed and capability now and I think marketers need to get on top and you don't need to code, but you need to understand that these capabilities are out there, right? It's, um, it's a bit like being in the kitchen and there's a microwave there, but you never knew what a microwave did. It's actually quite useful just for heating up the gravy quick and serving up the dinner just in the right way, right? If you don't know what those things in the kitchen do, I don't know how a microwave works, right? I, not really, but I know it's there and I know how to use it. I know what it can do. So it's the capa, it's the, I think that marketers really have to understand the capabilities, what can Okta do? What is it doing? And then think about what they want. If I was in FinServ or healthcare, Okta would be really important for me as a data source in deterministic identity. In healthcare and in finance, you can't get my identity wrong. You absolutely can't.

[00:32:26] Matt Duench: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:32:28] Sophie Crosby: And I think that's another thing. So I think marketers have to be really thinking about these, really reaching outside their comfort zone, um, to understand the technology that can power their marketing better.

[00:32:40] Matt Duench: Yeah. And I think that's such a great point because I know that even me personally being a marketer myself, when I first joined Okta, three years ago, you know, I, I joined and I said, this is like, this is amazing. I cannot believe that there is a system like an identity platform in place that can validate, you know, all of the data. It can enable me to collect consented information from my customers, right? It can enable me to do that over time. So even something as simple, what might seem simple as a login box or a registration form. I think everyone listening to this, yourself probably included, Sophie, if you've ever gone and interacted with a brand that has a very arduous, long, you know, login process or signup process, you get to the fifth field and you're, and you're asking, why are you asking me for, you know, my, where I grew up or my high school or things like this? It's, it's the, the simpler that you can make those interactions for us as consumers, is the key. And what I've seen is that identity really helps to unlock that because you could start to implement some things just at signup that you mentioned, progressive profiling. So over time. You're building that trust with that customer, right? You're validating their email address and their information. And has that changed over time? And that's actually information that you can, you can push into your CRM system, into your CDP to build a better, you know, collect all that data from different sources. And then use that consented data, identity related data to put into your CDP so that you can do those things. You can do more of the retargeting. You could do more of the personalization as well. And that's, that's really where it becomes super critical because there's different systems. Even at login, if I implement social login, so sign in with Google or sign in with Facebook, there's elements that we get within that login flow that can be used to effectively build that customer's profile, you know, with their consent and also with the least amount of friction as possible. 

[00:34:43] So we were actually speaking with a customer. Um, and all, so it was their marketing team and their marketing department. And something that they don't have is visibility into, they don't have a great database today. They're trying to figure out how they can tailor more personalized offers to customers, but also convert guest accounts to paid accounts. 

[00:35:07] Could you imagine? If you can, if you could convert 1%, 5%, 10 percent of those guest accounts, what that would actually mean, not only for a marketer, but for the business. Right. And you do that with things like you said, like a personalized offer. It's like, Hey, do you want to, you know, if you create an account and you get 10 percent off your, You know, your next, uh, your next, your next interaction or transaction. It's simple things like that. And I think it really comes down to something you mentioned earlier about having a value exchange, right? Because third party cookies going away does not mean the death of personalization. It means that marketers need to rely on systems like Okta, like the customer identity cloud, like their CRM and their various data sources. To gather that consented information, to deliver a value exchange. That's what's going to make me a loyal customer.

[00:35:57] Sophie Crosby: I mean, definitely. I mean, and obviously one of the things I love is the sort of biometric login, which I know Okta offers, you know, for there are certain accounts. I think, God, I don't know. And I think I'm just so relieved when it recognizes my face and I've got face ID and I'm in, you know. Um, uh, that's a, that's a big worry to me. It's like, what if I do forget that password for that bank account? You know, I mean, so there are things that really worry, worry me. 

[00:36:22] So I think this idea of identity sprawl, so both remembering passwords and that frictionless login, and having, you know, being able to access what is ours or what we want, and then also this identity sprawl of all these passwords out there and trying to remember them, is kind of an interesting thing. As a sort of big fan of liberal democracy and, uh, and, um, and individuality, you know, I'm, I'm concerned that we're not all, Reduced it that it isn't a reductive thing to reduce us to a sort of a singular digital identity, but I can also see that it's extraordinarily important and useful. And I think, you know, companies being able to integrate with something like that. And actually, you know, so if I am setting up a bank account that they can integrate and verify. Yes, Sophie is a taxpayer. Yes, she does exist. Yes, she is. You know, she's a. You know, she said she can do this thing, you know, borrow this money, whatever, that's kind of interesting. Equally, I'm always concerned about those people who may be, you know, there's always some people who are a bit off grid and you don't want to exclude them even more. But Okta, I think, um, that deterministic identity is very important. Um, I think there's other questions that marketers need to think about in terms of, there's a, there's a paradox between privacy, isn't there? And, and personalization. Um, I think personalization, you know, for quite a few years, I was going, everybody wants personalization. Everyone wants personalization. It's like, well, I do, but only when I want it. So there's an interesting thing here. You don't need to know who I am to be able to personalize to me, but if I click on... Puppy food on a website. You go, okay, well, she's got a, maybe thinking about getting a puppy or she's got one, so let's show her some other, so you're personalizing to me in that moment, you're, and that data doesn't need to go anywhere. It's just based on what I'm clicking on, on the website, kind of real time interaction management on a site or on a, on an app.

[00:38:18] Um, and I think that's important, but, um, being able to manage that balance, I think of privacy and personal is, is really important, but that, that friction thing. And I trust. It's trust, isn't it? And so allowing marketers to build trust with progressive profiling and showing that there is a relevancy and a timeliness. It doesn't need to say, Hey Sophie, but that there's a relevancy and a timeliness to what is delivered up to me, um, hopefully shows that my data is being respected to some extent. It's a, it's a growth thing. You don't trust people immediately. Um, and it's the same with companies. Trust is invested in companies, of course, so I think progressive profiling is a great way around that, actually, and to also just know that you're compliant as well, yeah. Oh,

[00:39:11] Matt Duench: a good point. And I think, you know, we, we talk a lot and many people talk a lot about the customer experience, right. And how, oh, we need to improve the customer experience and that's very vague, but I also think that the customer experience is the new competitive battleground because if we're two competing companies and I'm able to deliver an experience better, faster, more secure, more trustworthy than a competitor. I feel like everyone listening to this would, would know where you would lean or where I would lean at least. And so I also think that, you know, the customer experience is the new, it's the new marketing, like that is, that's effectively, that's, what's what we are. Right. And like, and I feel like data is that is the currency. It's the currency that feeds in to building those really great, you know, customer experience. I'd love to hear you, your thoughts on, you know, what

[00:39:58] Sophie Crosby: Mean, that's my, strapline, really, you know, customer experience is the new marketing and, and data is the new currency of marketing. And I think... Within that, most companies are trying to sell things and trust is that currency of interactions as well, which is important, you know, so that's, that's all in there.

[00:40:16] Every client, every customer I met at Salesforce, I met hundreds of, you know, some very big companies, you know, and it was an extraordinary time for me four years there. And I met a lot of companies who said, we want to put the customer at the heart of our operations, so we want to be, we are customer centric. And then you'd ask them, how do you, how do you manage, how do you measure? Because, you know, there's that mantra of, you know, if you don't measure it, how are you going to get it any better? I, you know, um. And they'd say, Oh, well, you know, so, you know, you can use net promoter score. You can use customer lifetime value, but that's kind of, you don't know whether your customer centricity.

[00:40:53] It takes a while to understand whether you're affecting CLTV, right? Like that's a number that's kind of hard to know quickly how you're affecting it. Um, and, and, you know, you can do some anecdotal research, um, you know, customer satisfaction surveys, right? You can ask one in every thousand customers. Do you think the CFO cares about that? Do you think the board cares about that? The way that established companies run is on, you know, quarterly. Financial reports, annual statements, and the, the urgency of sort of red and black numbers is real. And so the ability to say, we're not going to measure the company by that anymore, we're going to measure it by how customer centric we are. It's like saying, oh, we're just going to turn the company upside down. Um, and I think it's really, really hard, even for quite high level executives within companies, CMOs and others, to genuinely put the customer at the heart of the operation and to genuinely do that. Um, so I think because partly as well, departments are, I mentioned it earlier that, you know, the pressure is on. Every department is being asked to do more with less. Anyone listening to this in a company is being asked to do more with less. That's tough, right? Well, you know, you've got generative AI, surely you can do more with less. You're in marketing, you know, there's a touch of, it's data, how hard can it be, right?

[00:42:14] And, um, uh, so you're seeing budgets then, instead of that collaboration that I advocate for, you're seeing kind of departments almost warring against each other for the share of budget that is available, right? And the difficult thing is for marketers that if you're in an established company, if you're in a digital first, digital native company, maybe some of this stuff's a bit easier. You know, the data's in a better state, it's a bit easier to handle, you kind of thought of some of these consent issues beforehand when you collected it. Um, but, uh, you know, the data's often not in a great place. You know, in an established company, often the key customer data is in quite an old, fragile, crumbling system, you know, that you have to kind of, you know, blow on the pilot light to keep it going, you know, so there's, I think, you know, the, the, the expense or the difficulty in, in, um, putting the customer at the heart of your operations is difficult.

[00:43:06] And I think, um, there's a great company I worked with when I was at Salesforce. And they had a really great team of marketing and technology and operations. And they were really really well aligned. You would go to a meeting and there'd be somebody from each of those teams in the meeting. You know, like they were really well aligned with the software vendor and with what they were trying to do. And, um, this is a few years ago now, but the guy who was a guy called Alvaro de Palacios, he was the head of global channels at BBVA said, well, we've moved from products, you know, so selling mortgages, selling loans, selling bank accounts, selling whatever, um, to campaigns. To journeys, and now we do event driven marketing, i. e., like I said, I do this on the website or I do that on the app and, you know, you'll then send me, hey, are you looking at mortgages? You know, you'll respond to what I'm doing in a relevant timely way. But he said, eventually, he said, we will truly put the customer at the heart of our operations. That's the aim. But I like the fact that it was showed that, being customer centric is not something you can do overnight. Being customer centric is something that you have to do in stages. You have to do it iteratively, thoughtfully, and meaningfully. And you have to be really aligned. And that was a company that I felt, um, you know, it's banking. It's like, how can they be customer centric, right? But, but then also think about how central and important and emotive and incredibly empowering or disempowering finance is to our lives. And you go, yeah, it is important to be customer centric. So, um. It's tough to do. You've got to have good leadership, I think, to steer through the waters of the coming years, I think, and be truly customer centric. And of course, you've got to use Okta.

[00:44:45] Matt Duench: I can't think of a, of a better place to end the podcast episode on that point. That, that's pretty fantastic. But before we do, I want to, I want to do a couple of quick hits. Just, you know, get, get everyone listening to know you a little bit more. Uh, maybe what's something, what's something you're reading or watching right now that you're really into.

[00:45:03] Sophie Crosby: Okay. So I just finished watching, uh, the more, the last, uh, recent episode of the morning show. I enjoyed it much more than I expected. 

[00:45:12] Um, podcasts, uh, I listen to Leading by the team who do Restless Politics UK. Um, uh, politician Rory Stewart and, um, uh, ex Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell. Um, but I really like their Leading series. They interview, uh, leaders of the world. So like Michael Ignatieff, great interview with him. So you'll know about him because being Canadian. Um, Uh, and then reading, I just read a fantastic book, um, and I, I'm sorry, I'm not going to tell you I'm reading books about marketing and technology, but I think you always need to have a break from that stuff. I, I just, I, you know, these people who show you a stack of books on, on LinkedIn of like, here's all the business books I'm reading, and I always feel like an utter failure. I'm like, well, I'm not reading those. I'm reading a really interesting novel, you know, but I think our brains need different inputs, right?

[00:46:00] So. I just finished reading a book called In Memoriam, um, by a young woman called Alice Wynne. Well, I think she must be a young woman. I saw her picture on the, um, inside jacket and she looks, you know, elfin and very young and it's a come, it's =a stunning book if this is her first book. Um, it's set in World War I and it's a love story.

[00:46:20] I'm not going to tell you any more, but it's, it's, it's really well written and it was inspired by an author who I adore, Vera Britton. 

[00:46:26] A friend has bought me a book called A Time to Keep Silence by, um, a guy called Patrick Leigh Vermoor about his time travelling through monasteries in Europe in the 50s. Um, And a friend of mine was like, a time to keep silent, Sophie. Really? You? Okay, let's see if you learn from it. So, I'm not sure I could cope in a monastery, but I'm going to try reading that next.

[00:46:51] That's my next one. Patrick Leathermore, great travel writer, if you haven't come across him. Very interesting individual. Long dead now, but very interesting individual. Um, so yeah, those are the things I'm reading and thinking about. Yeah.

[00:47:02] Matt Duench: Awesome. What's, uh, what's a recent fun fact that you've, that you've learned?

[00:47:08] Sophie Crosby: Okay, I got two. I told these two, I was at a conference yesterday for Salesforce DevOps. I mean, God, I get around. Don't I? The most exciting places. And I told them these two fun facts and they were like, they loved them. So I'm going to tell these two fun facts to you. Um, again, nothing to do with MarTech, nothing to do with identity. I'm sorry. Um, one is that, did you know that Australia is wider than the moon? I think that's, I don't know why that blew my mind, but it did, yeah. So, um, the diameter of the moon is like 3, 400 odd kilometers, and Australia east to west is 4, 000 kilometers. And for some reason that just blew my mind when I found out. Um, uh, I'm sure people who are physicists, Physicists will laugh at me and think I'm stupid for not having known that before, but there you go. And then on a very, um, homespun scale, but in Switzerland, you're not allowed to own one guinea pig. It's against the law because they would get, because they would be lonely. So you can own two guinea pigs or three, but it is illegal to own just one guinea pig because they are by nature social animals and it's animal cruelty. And I think that's just, what a great law. Um, it's a bit random, but it's a great fun fact, right? 

[00:48:24] Matt Duench: That's a fun one. Um, maybe last, last question. Where, where is the best place for folks to find you online? They want to get ahold of you.

[00:48:33] Sophie Crosby: Uh, yeah, if you look for me on LinkedIn, I'm Sophie Crosby, and just type in Sophie Crosby Paso, P A S O, uh, and my website is paso-consulting.Com. I have a slight allergy to, uh, X, and, um, the only place really on Insta that I do anything is my, my dog has an account. So, uh, just find me on LinkedIn. It's the easiest way to get in contact with me. And then, you know, if we make friends, I'm sure we can move to a WhatsApp friendship soon enough. So that's, uh, that's how to reach out to me. Yeah.

[00:49:08] Matt Duench: Oh, that's wonderful. Thanks for sharing that, Sophie. Sophie, this was an incredible episode. I want to thank you very much for joining me today on the Mistaken Identity Podcast. Learned a lot about even what marketers need to think about from data collection to building really great customer experiences. Uh, so I want to thank you again for joining me today.

[00:49:23] Sophie Crosby: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

[00:49:26] Matt Duench: That was Sophie Crosby, co founder of Paso Consulting. As we wrap up this episode, remember that even though the marketing landscape is changing incredibly quickly, our job as marketers is to always stay customer centric. I'm Matt Duench. Join me next time on Mistaken Identity as we explore how to leverage customer identity to your advantage and build great products that customers love.