How Adobe's Marketo Engage Grew Their Customer Community

Will Fraser: Kevin, thank you so much for joining us here on the show today. It's an absolute pleasure to have you and I can't wait to jump into this conversation with you today. Kevin Lau: Yeah, thanks again for having me, Will. Will Fraser: Absolutely, my pleasure. I mean, Kevin, I think you're kind of one of the names to be named in this space and so I know that I'm looking forward to this conversation. We've had a few back and forth, a few attempts to get this going and I'm just really glad we'll be able to connect and make it all happen today. Kevin Lau: Yeah, for sure. Will Fraser: As I said, you're a pretty big deal in my opinion in this space and I'd love to kind of share with people if you could help us. Share people, you know. How did you get into this customer advocacy space? What's kind of the secret to this successful of a career path in this space? Kevin Lau: Well, I don't, I'm just like a normal guy like everyone else. But I guess I've had sort of an interesting journey to get to this point in time. So right out of college, I graduate back in 2000. I'm kind of dating myself now, but back in 2008 when we were in a recession in the US and I actually studied sociology and urban studies and planning. So I wanted to be a city planner at one point and the government really wasn't hiring anyone. So I ended up going into looking at different types of sales roles and everything else. And back in the day this is when social media is relatively just in infancy as a channel that customers and individuals could actually use to kind of build their platform, tell their story and engage a much larger audience. And so I started to take a bunch of different courses because I really was interested in business and marketing. And early then I was like really fascinated with like how social engagement would spark ideas and drive Community and whatnot. So I started doing social media consulting like right out of college. And I learned just working with a bunch of different organizations, small sized companies, all the way up to smaller, larger enterprises. Like, what are some of the fundamentals of how do you build relationships, how do you build community? And that ultimately helped propel me to learn and work in corporate America. So I worked for organizations like Google doing community management. And I really understood that this is before like customer marketing became sort of like a definitive discipline or a specialization. And I really like the fact that it kind of interweaves multiple different things together. It's everything from customer storytelling to relationship building to thought leadership, etc. And getting in the minds of like, what motivates your customers to want to share their story and their ideas publicly. And so that's kind of helped build the foundation and only kind of learn some of the fundamentals, which also brought me to working at a bunch of different B2B organizations and more recently at Adobe through the Marquette acquisition. Will Fraser: You know, one thing I love there, and I too entered the workforce around 2008, so I got to enjoy that wonderful time of the world. But I love, just for a second pausing and remembering, in 2008, social really was new. You know, like that is like for all of us to take a breath and take some context to realize that social realistically, 14, 15 years, you know, as a space and it feels like it's the world now. I just, it was such a cool time for those of us that got to play, you know, where Facebook changed daily, you know, and yes, Facebook was, you know, was one of the big platforms and you had huge amounts of learning. I just always love that. I'll just be honest with you there, but it sounds like you had a really interesting opportunity to really see the formation of more than just social. But you're saying also customer marketing, really, these evolution of these spaces, along that journey of evolution, you got to monitor there or get to watch there. Were there any moments where you just like, you realized how fast it was moving or has it just kind of been just like, you know, just keep up and going with it or kind of. What has that experience been like for you? Kevin Lau: So yeah, if I had to kind of sum up like the past 10 to 15 years, it was really sort of this, everyone was starting to adopt digital marketing and they were trying to kind of capitalize in the way of growth. And this is after of course, the dot com boom, but a lot of startup companies, organizations they were looking at, how do you essentially leverage your customers and build a channel that's going to help drive demand, drive growth, drive influence and awareness? And I think what was interesting is, I learned from a lot of different mentors along the way. What are things that are time tested that aren't really going to change? And a lot of it comes down to relationship building. It comes down to creating compelling content. It's how do you ultimately kind of build that ecosystem that's going to help you regardless of whatever the latest gadget, tool, resource, technology is out there? And I think that's definitely true. Like, even across new channels have come out like TikTok or video assets, the fundamentals are still pretty much the same. It's like, how do you become a really good storyteller? How do you surprise and delight your best customers and give them a platform to tell their story? And how do you put them front and center of everything that you do within your organization so that it's less about how is it going to make the company more money that you work for, but how is it going to make a bigger difference in the impact that your customers have when they're using your products or solutions? I think that's a true statement across whatever it is you're selling or whatever it is that whatever industry you're in today. Will Fraser: Yeah, Kevin, I think that's a great point. With the world changing so fast, the constants are actually the value and the rest of it is kind of the tool or the method. I think that's something that we see sometimes as well, where people might actually come looking for a tool to support their customer marketing. And they're out there looking for tools before they have strategy and before they actually have the content. And they're like, no, we need a platform for customer marketing. And you're like, and you know what, what do you want to do? What's the story you're telling? I don't know if you ever see that in your conversations, but it feels like that, that can, the gadgets can get in the way sometimes. Kevin Lau: Yeah, and I'm guilty of that too. Like, in the past, I was thinking, like, what's the latest shiny ball that I could follow that's going to help me prove impact or help me with reporting or make just my life incrementally better? And eventually I think we had to come to a conclusion that you could spend hundreds of thousand dollars in technology or solutions or whatnot. But like I said at the very beginning, it's really about how do you structure your team for success and how is it focused on helping the customer at the end of the day and then building your strategy around that, as opposed to just around a technology or solution that's going to make it slightly better? Will Fraser: Absolutely. But talking about building things, I mean, you did build a pretty cool program at Marketo there. And while there's probably many conversations we could have on the technology, you know, I think one of the interesting things to me that kind of ties this all together is how did that start? Like, what was the origin story? And then, you know, what is actually? What did you originally roll out? Kevin Lau: Yeah, so I joined Marketo back when we were in, like, a pretty critical inflection point. So if you could imagine, Marketo was around as an organization for probably about eight or nine years prior to me joining. And they were already a publicly trade company. They had just gone to private acquisition. So this equity had purchased Marketo for around $2 billion. So at that time, that was a big chunk of change, of course. And so we were going through a critical phase where a lot of the old leadership, even the former CEO that actually created the company, had sent left and brought in all new people. And so, just as any type of acquisition happens, you have all new leadership. You have a customer base that's a little bit leery. They're trying to figure out, are you still going to invest in the solution? Is there still going to be a strong investment in the technology, or are you just going to sell it and then break it apart and turn into something else? And so I kind of inherited this sort of this ecosystem, whereas a customer community, which is very strong, they call it the marketing nation, and then a subset of different programs that, we have running probably eight to nine different programs geared for customers. And it was not a very holistic view. Like, customers didn't really understand, like, where to find things. It was a little bit disjointed. It was based on, like, some people running programs in this, like, silo organization that just didn't quite make sense. Will Fraser: Yeah. Kevin Lau: And we also had a lot of this perception where customers were, like I said, very much wondering, what is the future of Marketo at that point. And so I had to kind of set expectations around how do you build these relationships with these customers, but also how do you build really strategic relationships with your C suite and all these folks that are literally brought into the company to shake things up, save money and also double our growth, you know, over the next couple of years. And this was roughly about a two year period. So from 2017 to 2019, we actually got acquired. There was a lot of things that happened that we can go into more detail about. But to set the stage, it was really about how do you shift and change those whole perceptions and do it in a way that's going to help drive growth and also play stability for the company. Will Fraser: That is a challenge. I mean, I think we've spoken to a few people on the show who have talked about the challenges of getting executive alignment and this and that. But that's a real challenge when you've got a customer base that's passionate but all of a sudden weary. And, you know, I think that's a really interesting challenge to have to tackle. And then also, you know, sounds like you had disparate, you know, eight or nine different programs kind of. What was the first step in trying to ease that weariness of that of that customer base? Kevin Lau: Yeah, it was. There was a lot of pieces that were involved, but I always like to approach any new program or situation by talking to the customers directly. So hearing directly from the horse's mouth, like, what's working, what are some of the challenges? How do we make these improvements and how do we essentially kind of partner together so that it doesn't feel like it's just something that we're trying to push as a company, but it creates sort of like this shared understanding that, you know, it's a partnership. It's going to take both of us to kind of work hand in hand to build something unique and magical. And I remember early stages, we had customers that we, you know, purple was essentially kind of like our brand colors. And so we had customers that would tell us, you know, we believe purple. We have it part of our DNA. We owe so much to Marketo because it helped us build our career in marketing operations. And we feel like we want to give back to that broader community that has invested so much in our time and in helping us build our credibility in the space. And so I started to reach out to the folks that were like the most passionate users of the product. And these are folks that we used to, that we call Marketo Champions or Marketo Engaged Champions. And I remember early on I used to think that these folks were like super entitled individuals that would just say, what's in it for me? How do I get more purple swag how do I get the latest gadget, or how do I get improvements to our solution or whatnot? And I really just kind of stepped back and just let them talk because I think at the end of the day, they really just wanted to feel like they were. Their opinions were validated and they really were. They cared like, we cared about what they had to say. And I think when I started to just listen to them proactively and just vet all the different challenges, opportunities, they started to open up and become more receptive to change and opportunity. Kevin Lau (continued): And to give you a sense, like, these were folks that, yes, they were very passionate, but they were also very candid about things that were not working. Like, they essentially, like around, I think 50 to 75 of them all put together this email and sent it to our CEO at the time. And it was essentially a list of grievances of why marketo is failing. And you can imagine, like a CEO sending this back to the broader team saying, you guys need to fix this. And so this kind of sparked a lot of these exploratory conversations on how do we fix our go to market, how do we talk to our customers and make them the center of everything we're doing, and how do we fundamentally flip the switch on shifting the perception away from, hey, we're a private equity firm that's about slashing prices and about really how do we create memorable experiences for the customer. And so that's helped kind of spark those conversations that I kind of alluded to talking to champions and building out sort of the programs from that based on the customer insights and feedback that we gathered during that period. Will Fraser: Of time, you know, you dug with that like 50 or 75 people writing the letter of demands to the CEO. I mean, on one hand you just go like, that is just gotta, you know, put the fear of God into a few people who get this email back from the CEO, being that we gotta fix these things. But on the other hand, man, what an awesome, passionate user base. That they were willing to, like, come together and be like, this is so important. They must know that we need these things fixed. Right? Like, it's like, you know, you've got this passionate base, a couple problems, okay. But just so lucky in some ways to get that feedback that I'm sure was hard to hear by a few people, but still wonderful to get it. Kevin Lau: Yeah, for sure. I mean, at the moment, I was fighting bullets all the time and just it was a little bit of walking on eggshells and we had other challenges Too, of course, like, as you go through an acquisition, there are periods of time when we had, I think at the time it was like 60, 70 marketers. And almost every other week we had people leaving the company. Just natural attrition. Right. Like, you know, you bring a new leadership, people don't agree with that. And so, you know, people were leaving left and right. And we were at a period of time where we had to just kind of wear multiple hats. I was doing everything from customer marketing, event marketing, helping to plan our user conference. And you just come to this realization that you just need to work more closely as an organization and you need to break down silos and just kind of get work done. Kevin Lau (continued): And I keep repeating the same ideology, but it really goes back to how do you make it easier for a customer to do business with you and just make it a more sticky relationship? And you do that by just partnering with them closely. And every decision that you make, you want to get that validation from them directly on how it's going to make an impact and make a positive improvement to their own livelihood. That's really all we did. It was just constantly getting that direct feedback and that input from them as we were making decisions. Will Fraser: I mean, you say it's all you did, and yet it's an amazingly hard thing for most organizations to ever get there. Right. You know, that truly thing about how do we add value and how do we make it. This customer centric conversation, it seems to be very easily corrupted by profit motives. So I think that's a great achievement to be able to switch that conversation. You're talking about breaking silos down. You also mentioned that you had eight or nine programs, you know, at this time, were you, you know, were you starting to collapse programs or what kind of happened about those silos? Kevin Lau: Yeah. So I can walk you through a little bit about what did that program ecosystem look like back in the day? So we were running everything from, I mentioned Champion. So that was essentially kind of like a brand ambassador program that evolved from our online community, the Marketplace Nation. So the end goal was to kind of serve multiple purposes where it's driving community engagement, it's tapping into these customers for product feedback, thought leadership, leveraging them for speaking engagements, et cetera. And then we also did a lot of the traditional sort of customer marketing advocacy, you know, programs, everything from customer references, customer advisory boards, helping to plan user conferences, you know, user groups, peer reviews, kind of the whole gamut. But as I kind of mentioned, the challenge that we really faced was that it was a very disjointed customer journey. And we realized that we had all these different disparate programs that customers didn't really understand. How do we join them? Well, how does this program sit in comparison to this other one? And what if I've been a user for three or four years and I'm looking to take my career to the next level? How do I get to that top of the echelon for marketo users? Kevin Lau (continued): And so we essentially created this program and I'll have to send you the image, but essentially what's called the Advocate Nation. It's this roadmap, if you can imagine, like a mountaintop where there's sort of like a map or a journey where people are kind of climbing the mountain and there's usually different milestones that people have to hit. But we created this as like an internal resource originally to better enable our teams. And this also goes back to how do you build that executive alignment? But it was around how do you tell that story where this is sort of the journey that a customer can take post sale. So after that sales engagement, what does that look like all the way through the time that they actually have that renewal conversation? And so it enabled our CSM teams, our sales reps, our support, everyone else internally, to kind of rally behind this idea of an advocate, to say, hey, Mr. Customer, you're just going through your onboarding experience. Okay, here are some of the programs you could join. Everything from our community to our user groups to kind of learn and engage with other users. And then, hey, we have a customer that's been around for a year or two years, they want to participate in a customer reference call, give us product feedback, or hey, you're a customer that has been here for five years. Why don't you apply to become a champion? And so this became a huge enablement resource for our sales and internal teams, but then also for our customers to understand what does that holistic journey look like. And we use it proactively to enroll them in sort of that vision. And it was kind of a rope. It was around sort of three pillars of what the Advocate Nation was all about. So it was around peer networking, giving them an opportunity to like, meet each other, connect, talk, you know, geek out about all things marketo. The second thing was about rewards and recognition. So it was about, how can I get more purple swag or how do I get that latest hoodie, or how do I get the purple water bottle, etc. And then the third piece was like the titles and the recognition around, hey, I want to be labeled a champion, or I want to be closer to the Marketo team so that I can build that relationship with them, so that they felt like they're part of that ecosystem and part of the decision making. So those three things became part of the advocation. Will Fraser: You know, it's amazing. I actually have seen that diagram and the context that you provide here about these passionate people that are bleeding purple, but also that confusion about, like, how do I get from step to step? And that they wanted to follow that journey to help fulfill their own career objectives and things like that. I think it really helps kind of bring it to life to me. And what an awesome way to both align internally and, you know, externally on this journey. Will Fraser (continued): You know, we already mentioned it earlier, we were talking, but, you know, sometimes it feels like the tool selected before the strategy, and this sounds like you kind of took a bunch of different ongoing programs, created a solid strategy. Did you then kind of start with any one piece of that? Like, did you bring that all into one environment for them or kind of what was this next steps after you had that strategy in place? Kevin Lau: Yeah, so it was. Excuse me, it was a very. So some of these programs, they were connected just by the nature of what they were. So we use market as sort of like the backbone technology where we could send and deploy campaigns, we could communicate with the customer. But some of these solutions, if you can imagine, like different martech technologies, we use everything from intuitive to bevy labs for user groups. Not all of them necessarily talk to one another. And so that became sort of like a bigger initiative and a bigger challenge around how do you ensure that the data and the technology in the back end is, you know, connected seamlessly? So you could tell that holistic journey back to your teams on how do you report influence measurement and really just show how you're driving impact for your organization. And that became actually a bigger challenge, as you could probably imagine. Like, everyone struggles with proving impact. And we were on the for a number of years, like, this is something that we're still challenging with today, where it's like five years plus later. But we started to build sort of that reporting mechanism back in 2017, 2018. And I'm happy to talk more about more detail. What does it actually look like? But essentially it was how lead scoring works from a prospect journey standpoint and flipping the script a little bit and then applying it to how do you identify customers that will become advocates for your programs down the road. Will Fraser: And was that when you say kind of building that, was that something you guys were doing with Marketo? Where were you kind of literally building writing code or having team members writing code and pulling things together or, you know, all the in between? Kevin Lau: I guess it was a little bit of. A little bit of everything. So we, we were using Marketo as sort of like the lead score mechanism. So if you can think about how like a prospect goes from, you know, different stages within Salesforce and they're scored on like a 0 to 100 scale. We've applied sort of like a similar methodology to score, like a customer based on, hey, you went to webinar, you went to an event, you wrote a piece of content, et cetera, and we score that customer based on their engagement. But then to report it back out, we have to kind of connect and integrate all these different, various solutions that I was kind of mentioning. And this is. I think today we probably use about seven to eight different technologies from Salesforce, Marketo, Microsoft, Power bi, and all these other tech, SAP solutions. And so then we have like a analyst and data reporting team that kind of helps us tell that story and put together and do all the coding, which I have no idea how to do, but they help us stitch it together so that we can then see what does that actually look like from a visualization standpoint and how do we report that out to, like, our leadership and executive stakeholders. Will Fraser: Yeah, I mean, this, this is, I think, just proof of the complexity of this challenge still that people face that, that, you know, on the surface it can seem, you know, we can summarize it in a single diagram. Right. But once you get into the weeds of actually running it, connecting it, reporting on it, you start to realize why in many ways this is still very much an emerging field of how do we do this, you know, how do we bring this all together for people? Yeah, I guess, kind of. Sorry, go ahead, Kevin. Kevin Lau: No, I was going to say, if there's a company that knows how to do this automatically, sign me up. I'll, you know, pay whatever is needed to make it happen. Will Fraser: Yeah, no, I hear you. Definitely. You know, moving data is still one of those great challenges that we face. For sure. I guess, you know, looking back at this, you know, great programs, you kind of got this alignment, you know, sort of bringing everything together. You know, kind of thinking pre the Adobe acquisition, was there, you know, anything that you kind of wish you had done a little differently or any lessons learned that, you know, from that time that you think would be valuable to others? Kevin Lau: Yeah, I think you know, we mentioned a lot about like the customer relationship. I think the other side of it is just having really good cross functional alignment. You know, for Marketo, you know, we were about a 1500 person organization when we got acquired and even though we were relatively small in size compared to a lot of companies, you know the relationship that you have with sales, customer success and the rest of the go to market functions, it can't be overstated enough that you guys, everyone needs to be very stitched in on how they approach customer relationships, how they approach campaigns and drive impact. Because if one team doesn't is not fully bought in, then it creates a whole host of other challenges or issues and around customer perception and ensuring that everyone's kind of aligned on like how do they engage the customer or communicate with them more directly. And customers can smell a mile away right when there's like something that doesn't quite work and one person is telling one story and the other is telling the other. And so I think this goes back to how do you build that relationship across all levels of the organization from the executive stakeholders all the way down to their direct reports, down to all the individual field reps and folks that are talking to the customer directly. And so we used to do a lot of different enablement campaigns and programs really designed about getting everyone on the same page and understanding what is the viewpoint the customer actually has when they're working with your company. Like what does that day to day look like, what are we actually solving? And this is where we leverage a lot of our customers to help with like sales training and boot camps and just setting sort of like the proper expectation on what that relationship can be if it's done well and what are the gaps that you need to fill and ultimately help to solve. And this is where, you know, I think it's like, you know, if you have the, your direct peers that you're very closely aligned with throughout that whole experience, that's when it becomes, you know, a better holistic experience. Kevin Lau (continued): Right. And I think that's ultimately what led to a successful acquisition with Adobe. You know, depending on who you talk to, they'll mention a lot of different things. But I think besides the technology of Marketo and the partner ecosystem that we had access to, the number three thing that led to the acquisition was how strong the customer community was. And I think by having that ecosystem, it doesn't just happen by itself. You have to have control teams kind of like weighing in, helping to grow that organically and showing customers like this is the place where you want to go to ultimately help you in your own career and helping you grow by learning from other experts. That was one of the things that was critical. It's like community and relationship building is fundamental to making it all work. Will Fraser: Yeah, no, absolutely. And you mentioned now the Adobe acquisition. So early in this journey, we have the acquisition by Vista and they, you know, weary kind of customers and you work through that and then you have another acquisition by Adobe. You know, how did that, how did the program evolve then, you know, how did their community react to a second acquisition? You know, were you in, Was it back to the same, the same challenge or was it a little different this time? Kevin Lau: Yeah, I mean, it was definitely a different challenge because, you know, for anyone that's been acquired by a private equity firm, typically there's a set of standards that they try to impart across every certain company that that acquiring organization does. So they had multiple other solutions that we were forced to use, you know, from an event standpoint, from an automation standpoint, et cetera. And then when we got acquired by Adobe, they essentially kind of left us alone for a certain period of time because they invested well over almost $5 billion. And so we had to deal with other challenges just around the scale of magnitude. Kevin Lau (continued): Right? So going from a 1500 person company now to 30,000 employees, we spend a considerable amount of time just trying to get to know who's who within the organization and understanding like, okay, this team does this, this team does something else. You know, when we first joined, you know, our North Star was really about how do we scale and ramp up and continue to grow, but still support the customers? Because similar to what you just mentioned, you know, we had other kind of conversations with customers. They were worried about like, hey, is Adobe going to take the technology, break it up and put it into something else, or are they really going to invest in Marketo ongoing and are they going to make it better? And so fundamentally it was about how do we continue to make sure that we have that direct feedback loop with customers on a regular basis so we understand what are those pain points. But then the other side of it is how do we tell that broader story to our internal teams that have no idea what marketo really does and what is the value opportunity that we provide as a customer marketing, customer advocacy organization? Because we had essentially six different teams that were doing different flavors of customer marketing, if you want to call it that way. So everything from like product teams, engineering support, you know, customer communications, they're all doing little aspects of customer marketing, from storytelling to feedback to running advisory boards. And so we had to kind of build those relationships with all those teams and essentially establish a center of excellence around what is retention marketing, what is customer marketing, whatever you want to call it, what does it actually look like that's going to help build that relationship, but also ensure that the customer wants to stay with you long term. Will Fraser: And that's interesting. This is almost like the reverse, right? You came from this kind of siloed environment here, collapsed it down. Now you got to go back out and figure out where those other areas live inside of Adobe. You mentioned North Star and this is kind of an interesting one to me. Did you find that the objectives or the metrics or that really the definition of success, you know, changed or matured as you joined Adobe? Was it, was there any kind of, kind of speaking different languages that you had to figure out there? Kevin Lau: There definitely were some differences for sure. I mean, Adobe is a very well oiled enterprise company that's been around for like 40 years. So they have processes, they have systems in place. But I would say they were very much stronger on sort of the B2C motion, especially since a lot of their business growing up was creative cloud, you know, the Photoshop indesign solutions. So they're talking to designers, they're talking to creative folks. And from a B2B standpoint, yes, they did demand and they did certain motions, but it wasn't quite the same way that we would think about it from a recurring marketo standpoint. So they didn't necessarily understand the same fundamentals on lead generation, how to build community, how to essentially kind of build out, sort of like a customer marketing function. And so I think that's one of the biggest benefits. I'm being a little bit selfish here, but I would say that's one of the biggest benefits they actually received when they actually acquired us too, because they got to see essentially what does that playbook look like or how do you create engaging programs where it's going to drive really strong customer experiences at the end of the day. And we've taken that sort of that blueprint of what we've done from Marketo and then applied it to the rest of the experience cloud business that we now sit in today, which is essentially eight or nine different solutions and it's continuing to grow, but it was very much a mishmash of acquisitions over the past 15 years. And customers inherently have the sense of loyalty that Mercanto customers did have for that brand or that product. Will Fraser: Yeah, that's actually a very powerful statement there that you kind of bring that to the table like you said. I mean, I think that's a, I mean if people are bleeding purple, I'm sure there's a lot of knowledge there that can be transferred into Adobe. And I guess that brings me to my last question on this point, which is, you know, you might be one of the most experienced people in the world about running a customer marketing program through acquisition like this, doing, doing two acquisitions and having a large community to help maneuver through both acquisitions. If you could give kind of one piece of advice to someone who's trying to maneuver their, their customer community and marketing through an acquisition, what would that advice be? Kevin Lau: The biggest thing I think is always having sort of like that voice the customer at your fingertips. And if we had to think about sort of like the biggest decisions that we had to make over the past couple years, you'd be surprised how many times certain individuals would not make decisions based on customer feedback. And they would do it sort of an inside out approach. And that typically ends up what, what ends up killing innovation or products really seeing the huge success that they could have because they're not getting that direct feedback throughout that whole, you know, life cycle. And so I think if you have a community, this is where you can then embed direct feedback and asking your customers at every stage of that decision making process, you know, what, even down to what should the look and feel of this community look like, what kind of color should we go with all those types of little things that I think is where getting direct feedback is so critical and not only just getting it from your customers, but then translating that back to your internal teams because I think sometimes they just don't understand like that is a goldmine of resources that they, you know, you have a product manager that's just thinking about the solution and they're in that very narrow view and they forget sometimes that there's actually someone on the other end that's going to be using this technology. And so I think that's where having that direct feedback throughout that whole journey is critical to ensure that it becomes successful and becomes something that you continue want to invest in. Will Fraser: And I guess during the, during the acquisition time there's a, there's a lot of change going on. Right. And that trying to use that customer voice maybe as like an even keel to help keep the conversations balanced and driven could be very helpful as well. Or if you can, if you can make it accessible to people. Kevin Lau: Yeah, like I can't overstate this enough because we, you know, with our Champions program as an example, we had a very really strong relationship with our CMO at the time, Sarah Kennedy, and we had this internal Slack channel that our champions had access to to kind of share product feedback or whatnot. And Sarah used to actually be active in that channel too, periodically and getting direct feedback from members. Kevin Lau (continued): I'm like, hey, what do you think about this topic? Or what do you think about this? And all the way through that whole acquisition phase, even to the time that we had our very first user conference where we were going from market only event which usually had about 4 to 5,000 people, then being swallowed up by Adobe where it had 18 to 20,000 users. And how do you maintain that identity throughout that event experience? And she was asking these folks directly, what do you want to see in this experience? What do you want from our speakers or keynotes or presentations and how do you interweave so that Marketo is not lost in the messaging and they feel like they're part of that broader Adobe ecosystem. And so that's where that whole alignment becomes critical. And having that direct access to the customer and interleaving that through every stage of the decision making is so critical, especially if you're going through some type of acquisition or even a product launch, to be honest with you. Will Fraser: Yeah, no, that's. And that's amazing to hear. Right when you got the CMO in there asking questions and that just speaks to a culture of customer centricity and a culture of really wanting to verify with the customer that you are delivering the value to them and not just a drinking and guessing type solution. Kevin Lau: Yeah, for sure. Will Fraser: You know we, lots of great content here and I'm sure we could go kind of on forever. I just kind of curious now that you know, you're part of the Adobe experience cloud and things have changed a little bit around the scope there. Any kind of new projects or new initiatives that you've got underway that you can share or any kind of changes to your portfolio, if you will, that you can share about? Kevin Lau: Yeah, I would say like the biggest, the biggest challenge that we're kind of tackling besides the metrics, the measurement piece, like that's ongoing. That will probably never end. As we start to get more sophisticated in how our models work, is really being able to constantly scale what we're currently doing. Like I think when we were a 1500 person company, relatively easy. You have a small team, they're each kind of managing their own programs and there's working with a subset of customers but then when you start to really grow and work for an organization that has tens of millions of users, it becomes very difficult to apply the same sort of like white club approach to everything as much as we want to. Right. And so we have to constantly think about how do we scale and how do we innovate and make decisions that are strategic in nature that are going to have an impact, not just a small subset of users, but to like the broader ecosystem. And so community becomes even more important because, you know, as you build a community ecosystem, you can reach more users. They feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves. And so community has also been central to our overall strategy and how do we continue to scale and grow. So that's what's really keeping us up at night and thinking through like, how do we constantly evolve. Will Fraser: Yeah, that does sound like a bit of a challenge. Especially you switch from like B2B where traditionally from a, you know, B2C comparison, a small user base and you then also have a B2C sized user base where you're like, well, we got 10 million users to engage in this community. You know, that's definitely a challenge and I'm looking forward to seeing, you know, how you guys continue to tackle that and, and just all the, all the other things. I'm sure you will be continuing to push forward with Adobe. Kevin Lau: Yeah, for sure. I mean it's fun, it's definitely fun work. Like, you know, the work is really enjoyable and I think the challenge, it's also equally sometimes stressful, but it also is something interesting and innovative and I think for similar size organizations, they're all kind of going through something similar to. Will Fraser: Yeah, I mean, before we, before we sign off here, any, any great pearls of wisdom, any, any message, you just wish that the whole world agreed with you on about this that you want to share today. Kevin Lau: Probably the one thing I've always been super passionate about is just, I think the balance between resources, between demand teams and customer teams needs to be more balanced. And I am grateful for the fact that just recently, you know, a lot more attention has been put on customer marketing and retention since the pandemic. But we still have a long way to go to being able to balance, you know, resourcing and budget and whatnot for what pipeline and new logos look like versus supporting retention at scale. So that's the thing that all carried in my grave of just, that needs to be a equal equation. But we're still a little bit off before we get to that point. But that's what I would say I. Will Fraser: 100% agree with you. I've often referred to it as the acquisition addiction and there is definitely a balancing. Well, Kevin, just thank you so much for joining us here today and sharing this. I'm sure we will steal as much of your time as we can in the future to keep learning about, you know, what you're doing and what you've done. Before we go, is there anywhere that people can connect with you, learn more about what you're doing, keep the conversation going with you? Kevin Lau: Yeah, so I'm fairly active on LinkedIn. That's usually where I post the most content. I'm sure we'll include the link, but I'm pretty easy to find. Kevin Kemp Lau. That's my full name. Will Fraser: Wonderful. We'll put a link like you said into the show there so people can find you. Just once again, thank you very much for your time today. It's been an awesome conversation and I can't wait to hear back from our listeners about it. Kevin Lau: Cool. Well, thanks again, Will. Appreciate it.