Inside Lev's Marketing Tech Stack with Holly Enneking

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. In The Clouds is a Marketing Cloud podcast, powered by Lev, the most influential marketing- focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience- obsessed, and podcast hosts Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful one- on- one connections with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how- tos, and real- life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Cole, what's your favorite Halloween costume you've ever had?

Cole Fisher: Oh, Bobby, there's too many to mention. I take Halloween very seriously, have since I was a kid and had to hand- make all the outfits and costumery. crosstalk-

Bobby Tichy: Is it still a passion at... How old are you now, 48?

Cole Fisher: It's not quite as much of a passion as it used to be.

Bobby Tichy: So, what are you going to be for Halloween this year?

Cole Fisher: I don't know that I will. If I'm not taking my nephews around and dressed as a giant Ninja Turtle or something like that again, then I may not actually dress up myself. My neighborhood doesn't get a lot of candy or Halloween- goers. So, you know, you have those neighborhoods that people migrate to because all the good candy and then the ones that they migrate from because they're better neighborhoods to stacked full of house to house candy.

Bobby Tichy: I think that they should advertise that they're a good Halloween candy neighborhood.

Cole Fisher: There should be menus on each door.

Bobby Tichy: Yes, that's a great idea. Because then I would know whether or not I even want to knock on it.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, that's got like," Yeah, we just have that wax paper, orange and black things that are some sort of gross toffee." No, thank you, next house. Apples.

Bobby Tichy: Oh, that's good. I'm trying to think of the last time I actually went trick or treating. Is this the Halloween podcast? I think it has to be now. I mean, I don't know how that parlays into our guest, Holly Enneking, the vice president of marketing here at Lev, but Holly, how could we make this to Halloween podcast? Should we talk about spook topics?

Holly Enneking: Ooh, yes. Go into scariest marketing experiences, I think we can-

Bobby Tichy: Oh, that's good. Worst websites.

Holly Enneking: Ghosts of marketing mistakes past. I think there's plenty we can do.

Bobby Tichy: Man. We should do a April Fools one as well. I always like when businesses do April Fools, like when the IHOP said they were going to change their name to IHOB, International House of Burgers. That was great.

Holly Enneking: I love a good April Fools joke. I always wanted to do the website takeover, back to the old Geosites design, just really take it back, have a visitor count and flames, and crosstalk-

Bobby Tichy: I wonder if IT could do a whole April Fools and make everybody get on dial up, like when you try to log into your email, it does the dial up sound.

Holly Enneking: I love that.

Bobby Tichy: Well anyway, thanks for joining us, Holly.

Holly Enneking: Thank you, good to be here.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, you bet. We really wanted to have Holly on to talk through Lev on Lev and what our marketing technology stack looks like. One, because I don't think Cole, you or I have any idea what it is.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, we mostly make wild assumptions on what we're using and things like that, but...

Bobby Tichy: From what I hear, we're heavy on direct mail.

Cole Fisher: Oh, okay.

Holly Enneking: Absolutely.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, heavy on direct mail and door- to- door and outside of that, we really don't have any idea and we are curious. So, it was just really interesting to think of having Holly on to talk through what our tech stack is, what we're using for what some of the pain points that she has in leading her team. Then also some wishlist items as well that'll hopefully help some of you figure out what you should add to your stack or what potential elements could be retired from it as well. So Holly, if you wouldn't mind, just starting with a overview of Lev's target market and really the different area that you're focused on within the marketing channel.

Holly Enneking: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm excited to have this opportunity to illuminate for you how advanced our marketing tech actually is and how much we're using and what all we're getting out of it. But when I'm thinking about Lev's go- to- market approach, really the first audience that we're thinking about is who our end users are at Lev. So, really it's a pretty B2B, but even a B2B to C business, when we're thinking about the brands that we're working with and how we're helping them leverage Salesforce and all of the products within the Salesforce ecosystem in order to drive the customer engagement that we're looking for. So, that's really one piece of it is, how we are thinking about the needs and the challenges and the expectations of marketers who are using Marketing Cloud and like I said, these other Salesforce products, in order to deliver marketing experiences that are best in class and driving value for the business. But what I'm thinking about from my perspective as a marketer, on one hand, we have to be prepared to marketing to those audiences, but we're also very channel- focused. So, we spend a lot of time in our marketing activity, marketing into Salesforce itself. So, how are we driving awareness within the Salesforce sales team about who Lev is and what we do and why they should look to us as the partner of choice when they have these customers who need support in getting their Marketing Cloud inaudible stood up, when they need help bringing in other products and integrations and just thinking about their broader marketing strategy. So, there's really two audiences that I'm thinking about at any given time, which is the end users, the customers that we're working with day- to- day, and then these channel partners who are really central to how we drive our business and fuel our growth.

Cole Fisher: So, speaking about fueling that growth, let's dive into a little bit about the marketing tech. So, we do a bit of drinking our own Kool- Aid. So, we're a Salesforce shop, but those are not really the only tools in our tool belt. So, let's dive in a little bit into what Salesforce tools we're using and then what we're integrating with and what some of the other tools and features that we leverage are.

Holly Enneking: Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm very much a proponent of drinking our champagne as it were. So, on the Salesforce side, there's quite a few different products that we have been using for a long time, some things that we're getting up and running with right now. So, obviously we're using Sales Cloud, Salesforce CRM, which is where we're storing all of our contacts. We've got all of our campaigns, I'm using that for all of my marketing attribution and to be able to see what campaigns are working, what's not working, who are we engaging with, and what is that doing for the business? We also use Pardot for all of our email marketing. That's a really big component of our go- to- marketing strategy, is what we're doing from an email marketing side. So, Pardot is a great tool for us when it comes to managing that engagement, but then also supporting what we're doing from an integration perspective within CRM, in order to track those campaigns and to track what's working and not working. We also use both Social Studio and Ad Studio, Ad Studio being a more recent addition to our tech stack. Social Studio, we've been on for a little while now, but it's great because we have the opportunity with both of those tools to be able to leverage our internal teams within Lev, to help us get up and running. So, we actually have some different teams that we're working with who have been giving us training, who have helped us get campaigns set up, who have gotten us all of the tools and resources we need to be able to use them, and it's great to be able to leverage the expertise of our teams at Lev in order to use tools that I had not used previously, so I'm getting experience there as well. Then the newest one that we've added on is actually Datorama, so we're using that in tandem with our rollout with Ad Studio, to be able to track everything that we're doing from a paid advertising perspective and to see what we're spending, what sort of impressions it's driving, which channels are working well or not working well for us on any given campaign. Hopefully we'll be able to continue to build more dashboards out there and continue to drive that visualization, in a way that we haven't before. So, I'm really excited about that one. On the non- Salesforce side of the house, there are a couple of really key tools that we're using. So, the first being Terminus, formally Sigstr, which we use specifically for our email signatures. As a consulting business, we send a lot of emails and that is a really great opportunity for us as a marketing team, to be able to promote content that we have, events that we have upcoming, we see lots of really great engagement there, and it's a nice opportunity for us to really drive just brand consistency and get more brand visuals into a medium that's being used consistently and at a super high volume for Lev. The other one that is really central to our marketing strategy is Uberflip. So this is a content management platform where we host all of the content for our blog. We host all of our eBooks and customer stories, and all of the great resources that we have that are external facing for the Lev brand, everything lives there and it gives us the opportunity to manage all of that content from an internal perspective, but then also externally to have a blog experience that gives users the ability to filter and search and to drive from one related piece of content to another. Then I'd say a couple other ones that we use Google Analytics, obviously to track our website performance. Then we also use Instapage for some of our other landing pages, just to make sure that they... it gives us a little more flexibility when it comes to design and layout and having just a little more flexibility than you might get in some other web development platform. So, we like Instapage for that. Then I'd say the last sort of suite of things that we're using are from just a management perspective of just managing all of our projects and the work that we have going on. So, from that perspective, we rely really heavily on Slack and Google Drive and Trello, just to manage all of the requests that we have, all of the projects that are going on, saving all of the assets and resources and things that we're working on any given time and then Slack to communicate within our team, with the rest of the business, with specific teams within the business, just to keep us on track and all talking about the same things at the same times in the right ways.

Cole Fisher: crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: I was going to ask if you had a favorite platform out of all those different elements, one that you either use the most, or you find the most beneficial, or the one that has had the highest ROI for Lev?

Holly Enneking: I would say if I had to point to one that has the highest ROI for Lev, it's absolutely Pardot, when it comes to what that's done for us from an email marketing perspective and how crucial that is for just our ability to engage with the audiences that we're working with. If I lost Pardot, I would really, really be in trouble. I would say the other one that I'm a really big fan of that I use a lot and is something that I've used in past jobs, and I will continue to use moving forward is Trello, just from a project management perspective. Trello's one that when you find a good way to use it, that works for you and your workflow, it can be really powerful. And some of it's just finding the right way to use it. I've been in places where we haven't found it and it feels like a burden, but if you're using it in a way that works for your team and really thoughtful about how you're using the features and functionality, that can be really helpful, especially when you're managing a lot of requests and work and people working on similar projects. I'm a big fan of that one.

Cole Fisher: One of the things that I really enjoy, which I should probably say is more of like a guilty pleasure, is the fact that all of the customers and prospects that I feel like we talk to are marketing teams that have all these specific pain points. I feel like our marketing team really empathizes with that because all these pieces of technology that we're talking about, it's like when you're looking for a new feature set or a new technology or capability, once you actually get that and attain that, or implement that, it's not like your problems are over. Now, you just move on to solving other problems and I feel like we have this team that has... Like I said, echoes a lot of the other pain points that other marketing teams have in terms of how small and nimble they are. That always seems like they're balancing a thousand plates in the air, there's always something going on. Even though we've all got all these tools that automate and do all these capabilities to try to make that load as light as possible. But talk to us a little bit about, about the team, what the makeup is, and how we overcome some of those pain points.

Holly Enneking: Yeah. So our marketing organization at Lev includes three separate teams at the moment. So, we've got a marketing team, we've got an alliances team and we have a sales development team. The marketing team itself is full time, four people, with myself as a leader of that group. So, it's a small group that is doing a lot of output. So, I mean, we're putting out lots of content. We're putting on lots of activity. We are doing external messaging to Salesforce. We're talking to customers, we're doing a lot of internal work. We're doing a lot of recruitment marketing. So, there's a lot that's happening in this small group. The way that we have it broken down right now is we've got one person who is content marketing, Bri Mullally, who is the owner and driver behind all of our thought leadership and blog content, supports this podcast. Anything that's written and has some sort of Lev point of view, Bri's got her hands in it. We also have another Bri, so if one Bri is good, two Bris are even better, Bri Jones who runs all of our brand and digital work. She's got a digital marketing manager, Lily Dorsey and a full- time designer, Kristin Martin, who does all of our beautiful brand and design work and brings the Lev brand to life. The three of them are really a powerhouse when it comes to how we're creating all of these brand and digital experiences from a go- to market perspective. So, the webinars and how are we taking the content that Bri's creating and activating it across our various channels? How are we then partnering with Jessica Leeds and Mary Whistler who head up our alliances team? How are we supporting them as they foster our relationship within Salesforce? And then how are we supporting our sales development team as they're supporting the sales team, partnering with them in their efforts to go to market, both within the Salesforce channel and with our customers? So, it's a small group that's doing a lot of things and balancing a lot of different requests and priorities at any given time. But I can't think of a more talented team out there, quite frankly.

Bobby Tichy: It'd be pretty funny if you said," Yeah, I mean, they're all good people, but they could probably be a little bit more talented."

Holly Enneking: Oh my gosh.

Bobby Tichy: Or," Really talented, but just awful people. I mean the worst people to work with."

Holly Enneking: No, inaudible with this group, they're the best of the best, and that is not an exaggeration.

Bobby Tichy: I've worked with a few of them, they're okay, they're okay, they're good.

Holly Enneking: That's fine. They're good enough.

Bobby Tichy: I could take them or-

Holly Enneking: No, they're the best, come on.

Cole Fisher: crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: No, they're great. Yeah, they're awesome. When it comes to, especially the team and the resources, or maybe it's other elements too, you mentioned about just sometimes not having enough, or how scrappy the current team is, what are some pain points, or as well as some upcoming plans that you guys have on the marketing team?

Holly Enneking: Yeah. I mean, just time and resources is a common struggle across all kinds... There's always so much to do from a marketing perspective. There's almost so much potential of things you can be trying and things you want to test and new, you want to go after. I think that's one of the biggest struggles, is how you balance both the time and talents of the team that you have and the resources you have available in order to drive as much value as you can and maybe make some concessions on things you don't have the capacity to do right now, or something that you may have to come back to, or something that's just not going to be a good fit with the expertise, or the way that you're wanting to go to market. I think that's always a struggle. So, I think for me, when I'm thinking about our tech stack specifically, and one of the things that I have to think about because I've got a small team and I really need to be able to show the value of the work that we're doing and the investments that I'm making with the limited budget that I have, it's really important to me that we make sure everything that we're doing integrates back into our Salesforce tech stack specifically at some level, either into Pardot, or into Sales Cloud, because I need to be able to track everything. I need to be able to make a case for what's working and what's not working and be able to demonstrate to the rest of my executive team what's working to help my team prioritize where we're spending time, to help make a case within our partners, within the business, be it on the sales side or the accounts side. So having that integration is really crucial. If something doesn't meet that need, if I can't find a way to integrate it, that's a good reason for me to say no to maybe adding something new to our tech stack. So, I think being really intentional about how all of the pieces fit together gives me a good guidepost for what I can and can't invest in. I think the other thing that I'm super self- aware of is just making sure that I don't have anything that we've invested in, that's just sitting there and not really driving value, or we haven't had the time to really innovate on or figure out how to get the most out of. There's always a state of something working well enough and maybe having potential to be getting more out of it. I certainly have some items on my tech stack right now that I say fall into that, but I never want there to be anything where I'm just not doing anything, that it's not getting me any value, that I haven't really started to scratch the surface of what it could do. So, if we don't have the time and resources to get the most out of something, then that's another reason for me to not make the investment because the last thing I want is anything that's just shelf- ware really.

Cole Fisher: Holly, that sounds so simple, but that's such a common pain point that we hear from so many different teams is like," Here's something that was implemented..." and to your point, already, it's a budget line item that's already overhead and cost to us. But on top of that, the amount of time and resources, implementation that may have gone into that is such a waste, just for it to be sitting on there as shelf- ware, just not being leveraged at all. So, that's a huge issue, we always run into all the time, but in terms of wishlists, hypothetically we have the resources, we have the ability to onboard and implement, and we're not worried about resource bandwidth at the point, what would we be implementing today? What what tools would we be next leveraging if you had it your way?

Holly Enneking: Yeah, I would say top of my wishlist at the moment would absolutely be Interaction Studio. So, something from a real- time personalization perspective, I think Interaction Studio in itself is just a really interesting software, that there's so much again, to that point of the amount of potential that's out there, of what could you do and what could those experiences look like? That makes me really excited as a marketer and someone primarily with a pretty heavy digital marketing background. So, thinking about what we could do with Interaction Studio, from a website experience, is something that I would just love to get to the point of being able to implement. And selfishly, it gives me another chance to work with our internal teams, which is something that I've always really loved and valued. I know when I first came to Lev, I was a little nervous about coming to a company where I was going to be leading marketing for a company made up of marketing experts. That's an intimidating role to step into and somewhere else, maybe not as collaborative as I have found it here, but actually it's been great because whenever I run into any sort of issue or question, I've got a whole team of experts that I can go to and I know the Lev space and what Lev is trying to do, but then I can tap into their expertise to help me just get a little bit more, to do something a little bit better, or think about things in a way that I wouldn't have because of the experience that they're bringing to the table. So, I think that real- time personalization something Interaction Studio would be really fun. The other one that's really high on my list is online chat. So, I've used Drift in the past. There are some other offerings that are out there that I think are really interesting, that I think that could be something, as I'm thinking about how we're leveraging the website and managing the traffic there, and maybe finding ways to engage the sales development team, or how our marketing team could be leveraging that just to help drive people pulled down particular paths that we want them to take. I think chat is really interesting. That's one though, where going back to our conversation about how you're evaluating tech that you bring into your tech stack, that's one where from a time and resource perspective, I don't know that we have it right now and so that's been... If I had it, I would probably pull the trigger on it really quickly, but it's been one that's been on the wishlist for a while now because I see the potential, but I'm afraid of signing my team up for something that would be too much to manage and would end up being something that's just sitting there and not really getting the use that we want to out of it. So, it's one where I'm starting to feel a little excited, like maybe we're getting close to that and I think that one is pretty high on my list of things that I'd like to see.

Bobby Tichy: Before we move on to completely unrelated, do you have a favorite campaign, or a favorite activity that you've done in your time at Lev?

Holly Enneking: I would say there are two that I'm really proud of. So, the first one is, going back to talking about Pardot being really central to our business and how we're going to market. We did a campaign that we called, All You Need Is Lev. It was essentially a brand building awareness campaign into Salesforce, just about who we are, what we do. It had just such a fun design, the tone of it was really fun, it was a playing... lots of puns around music and songs, and it just generated a lot of buzz and awareness and was an opportunity for us to go to market from a channel marketing perspective with a brand point of view that I think is different than other partners. One of the things that I really love about the Lev brand is, the way that I try and think about it, is that we take our job seriously, but not ourselves. I want that to really be inherent in the Lev brand and what the campaigns are that we're doing. I think that one really embodied it and had the success to back it up. The other one that I would say I'm hands down the most proud of is Ultraviolet, which is the conference that we put on in April of last year, that we're working on... or April of this year, it feels like a million years ago, but it was really only like six months ago. We're already starting to plan for the next one, essentially two days of content, jam- packed, both you guys were involved in it with great sessions that you put together for us. It was like six months of really hard work of pulling this event off, but really blowing all of our expectations out of the water as far as what we could do and who we could engage, and the number of registrants and participants, and the types of content we could put on, and going back to bragging about how amazing my team is. It was only possible because this really incredible team made it happen and made this random, crazy idea that I had a reality. So, from a broader team, something we were able to pull off together, that is absolutely a feather in this team's cap of putting together an event that will probably be one of my all- time career highlights, for sure.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, you guys did an awesome job at that. Bobby, I almost jumped in and answered the question for you. Because I was on mute, almost trying to yell Ultraviolet.

Holly Enneking: Ultraviolet.

Cole Fisher: You guys just blew that out of the water, that was amazing.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, Ultraviolet was a blast.

Holly Enneking: Yeah, you guys were awesome. I was so grateful to have both of you guys with such great sessions, that you two volunteer that's... about Lev with all these experts. People like you who are so willing to volunteer your expertise and give that insight, I think is what makes Lev so special and such a great partner. So, thank you guys for being a part of it too. And don't worry, I'll be reaching out to you soon for what sessions you'd like to do next time.

Bobby Tichy: I can't remember, how many sessions were there?

Holly Enneking: We had over 30 sessions over the two days.

Bobby Tichy: Of those 30 sessions, Cole, I heard ours were number 44 and 45 on the most popular.

Cole Fisher: That sounds about right.

Holly Enneking: crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: Well, thanks again, Holly, for joining us. Shifting to completely unrelated and as we were prepping for the podcast, Holly, you had shared that your daughter is big into Halloween and this podcast will come out during the Halloween time. So in that vein, the best and worst thing you've gotten while trick or treating?

Holly Enneking: So, I'm going to hot take with the best thing. My hands- on favorite candy is 3 Musketeers bar. I love them. That's the one that usually everyone else is trying to give away is 3 Musketeers. I love them, I'm all for it. So, I'm usually trying to crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: Do you freeze them?

Holly Enneking: Yes, at least in the fridge. Freezer is even better. I feel that same way about Reese's as well. Give me a Reese's Pumpkin that's been in the fridge and that's an ideal Halloween candy.

Bobby Tichy: So, is there a worst?

Holly Enneking: I would say the worst thing I've gotten, definitely when you get a penny or a pencil, those are never crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: Who's giving out pennies and pencils?

Holly Enneking: I definitely got some of those in the door- to- door days of the'90s. My kids though, don't experience that. My neighborhood is one where multiple houses have full size candy bars.

Bobby Tichy: Oh see, that's what's going to be my best.

Cole Fisher: Those people are saints.

Holly Enneking: Yeah, true.

Bobby Tichy: Doesn't matter what kind of candy it is, if it's a full size one, that's my new favorite house.

Holly Enneking: Anything that's not candy is the worst to get. You don't want to get a bouncy ball or any crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: Well, no, my worst was going to be... remember those big popcorn balls?

Holly Enneking: Awful, yeah.

Bobby Tichy: And it wasn't like it was good popcorn. I love popcorn, but the popcorn ball was like it been stale for three years. So, it was hard as a rock. You couldn't even eat it. It's awful.

Holly Enneking: That's that's really bad. What's your favorite?

Cole Fisher: Anything you can't rot your teeth out with should not be on the Halloween menu.

Bobby Tichy: I agree, completely agree. And anything that's sugar is my best. I don't discriminate when it comes to candy. Reese's are definitely up there. I'm a big fan of 3 Musketeers, love Almond Joy, Skittles, Sour Patch Kids. You know what I miss though, when I was a kid? I used to hope that people have them and then anytime I had a dollar or something, I would go buy them at the candy store. Do you guys remember Warheads?

Holly Enneking: Yes. Oh, love a Warhead.

Cole Fisher: Were Warheads sour?

Bobby Tichy: Yeah and you'd bet your friends to eat three at a time to see if their mouth would burn up or something like that?

Holly Enneking: Yes.

Cole Fisher: Were Warheads sour? I remember Tear Jerkers. Were those like the generic Warheads?

Holly Enneking: I think so.

Bobby Tichy: Well, I think it was just a different brand of them, but yeah, same concept.

Cole Fisher: I love Tear Jerkers.

Bobby Tichy: Well, because they had a Tear Jerker Warhead. It was like a more sour Warhead. I got to check out and see if they still have Warheads.

Holly Enneking: Yeah. Warheads were incredible, absolutely loved those.

Cole Fisher: I feel like my favorite was... My grandmother's house was down, outside of the neighborhood. So, we would always go there last and she would basically take a whole bucket of Starburst and just dump it into my trick or treat bag. And I was just like," Yes," you knew at the end crosstalk.

Bobby Tichy: Oh my gosh.

Cole Fisher: And then of course, my parents would roll it up on the brown paper bag on top of the fridge and we'd only have a little bit after school snack and I know they were fishing out of it. They would never admit it, but they were fishing out of it, for sure. But I guess the least favorite for me was anything that was like... like those, I mentioned, the orange or the black wax paper twist things that were over some random toffee, or something like that. I like caramel, but anybody who gave away Werther's was like... inaudible you think you're coming for the early bird spesh before bingo or something? Werther's was old person candy. I want Starburst or something super sugary that's going to rot my teeth out.

Bobby Tichy: Which is so funny because now, love Werther's.

Cole Fisher: I hate you. I imagine you're the Werther's handout guy in your neighborhood.

Bobby Tichy: Oh definitely, yeah. Although one of my other bests now is the fact that we don't have kids and we don't really live in a neighborhood that does a lot of trick or treating, but I still will go to this candy store and buy two or three huge bags of candy. Like," Well, we got to have it just in case," and then I just eat candy for the whole month after.

Holly Enneking: Well, I have two kids who I can send out to trick or treat and I have an eight- year- old son who can hit a lot of houses in one night as he demonstrated last year. I got to say, there's a big benefit to sending him out to do all the hard work and then I get to pick out the candy that I like while he's asleep, I'm definitely that mom, that mom.

Cole Fisher: I knew it.

Bobby Tichy: Boy, I really hope your kids don't listen to this podcast.

Holly Enneking: I won't be able to listen to this one in the car with them, that's for sure.

Bobby Tichy: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Holly. Really appreciate the time.

Holly Enneking: Thank you.

Bobby Tichy: And as always, you can reach out to us intheclouds @ levdigital. com. If you have any feedback, specific topics or things you'd like for us to discuss, we'd love to hear from you, thanks again.