This episode features an interview with Shannon Duffy, Chief Marketing Officer at Asana. Shannon leads global marketing efforts, including corporate, product, growth, revenue, and engagement. Prior to Asana, she held the role of Executive Vice President Cloud and Industry Marketing at Salesforce where she guided messaging, experiences, and go-to-market strategy for their flagship products. Shannon is a technology marketing veteran who has held leadership positions in the industry since 2003. In this episode, Kailey sits down with Shannon to discuss how Asana is building the future of work with AI workflows that complement a deeply human customer experience. From AI to human hand-offs to prescriptive use cases that delight customers, we discover how Asana has harnessed the power of good data to fuel it all.
This episode features an interview with Shannon Duffy, Chief Marketing Officer at Asana. Shannon leads global marketing efforts, including corporate, product, growth, revenue, and engagement. Prior to Asana, she held the role of Executive Vice President Cloud and Industry Marketing at Salesforce where she guided messaging, experiences, and go-to-market strategy for their flagship products. Shannon is a technology marketing veteran who has held leadership positions in the industry since 2003.
In this episode, Kailey sits down with Shannon to discuss how Asana is building the future of work with AI workflows that complement a deeply human customer experience. From AI to human hand-offs to prescriptive use cases that delight customers, we discover how Asana has harnessed the power of good data to fuel it all.
-------------------
Key Takeaways:
-------------------
“It's really important to me that my teams have a culture of data. How is that woven into the fabric of our marketing work? It's not just enough to do, you have to make sure it is performing and you have to make sure it is resonating with your customers. It's not just like, ‘Did this do well or did it not?’ If it's not doing well, it's not resonating with their customers.” – Shannon Duffy
-------------------
Episode Timestamps:
*(02:56) - Shannon’s career journey
*(05:36) - Trends impacting marketing and customer engagement
*(11:55) - How Asana is testing AI and the customer journey
*(17:01) - How Shannon defines “good data”
*(27:05) - Changes in customer engagement in the next 6 to 12 months
*(32:35) - Shannon’s recommendations for upleveling customer experience strategies
-------------------
Links:
Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn
Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn
Learn more about Caspian Studios
-------------------
Sponsor
Good Data, Better Marketing is brought to you by Twilio Segment. In today’s digital-first economy, being data-driven is no longer aspirational. It’s necessary. Find out why over 20,000 businesses trust Segment to enable personalized, consistent, real-time customer experiences by visiting Segment.com
[music]
Shannon Duffy: It is really important to me that my teams have a culture of data. Like how is this woven into the fabric of our marketing org? It's not just enough to do, you have to make sure it is performing and you have to make sure it is resonating with your customers. And it's not just like, did this do well or did not? If it's not doing well, it's not resonating with our customers.
Kailey Raymond: Hello and welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond, and today we're exploring the evolution of marketing strategies in the digital age. Improving customer experience, enhancing workflows, and driving ROI are only possible with good data. Having a culture of data allows us to understand customer needs, create immersive experiences, and leverage AI to develop meaningful connections. Joining me today is Asana CMO, Shannon Duffy. We discuss how Asana is building the future of work with AI workflows that complement a deeply human customer experience. From AI to human handoffs, to prescriptive use cases that delight customers, we discover how Asana has harnessed the power of good data to fuel it all.
Producer: This podcast is brought to you by Twilio Segment. Segment helps every team access good data, data that's real time clean and accurate. The result, relevant customer experiences that drive real revenue. From creating more engaging customer loyalty programs to optimizing your ad spend, Twilio Segment helps over 25,000 companies turn customer data into tailored experiences. Learn more about why everything is better with good data at segment.com/good-data.
Kailey Raymond: Welcome to Good Data, Better Marketing, the podcast where we speak with influential marketers and digital innovators and learn their tricks of the trade. They help us understand exactly what good data is and share stories about how they've created digital first customer experiences that stick. I'm Kailey Raymond and I lead campaigns and ABM here at Twilio segment, and I'm your host. And with me today for our CDP Live edition, I have Shannon Duffy, CMO of Asana. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.
Shannon Duffy: Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
Kailey Raymond: This should be fun. We have a lot to talk about, a lot to cover, and I wanna get to know you and your career journey. As I understand it, prior to Asana, you held roles at Salesforce, previously the Executive Vice President, Cloud and Industry Marketing at Salesforce, where you guided messaging experiences and go-to-market strategy for their flagship products. You're a real technology veteran as well, having leadership roles in the tech industry since 2003. So, stoked for you to be here and learn from you and how you're shaping best in class digital customer experiences. In your own words, tell me how you got to where you're today.
Shannon Duffy: That's a great... How did I get here? I don't know... No, I knew very early on that I always wanted to be in marketing. I think as a child, I thought it was advertising, but when I graduated from college, I realized that marketing was what I wanted to do. I was very lucky that I had taken an early HTML coding class in the '90s, which...
Kailey Raymond: Shout out.
Shannon Duffy: Right? I know, it dates me and tells you all how old I am, but it was the beginning of sort of the dot com boom in the late '90s and I had one HTML class and that made me very hireable and I started working for startups. I moved up to the Bay Area in 2000 because that's where all the action seemed to be. And then I was doing marketing. I was either doing digital marketing for traditional companies or working, doing digital marketing for newer tech companies. Loved it. Loved being in Silicon Valley. Loved just the disruptive nature of all the things that people are doing and the minds and brains of using technology to change the world. And in 2007, I started working for a company named Jigsaw, which was trying to change the way data was captured, right? So my data roots, they go back.
Kailey Raymond: They're deep.
Shannon Duffy: And that company was acquired by Salesforce in 2010. And so that's where I began my Salesforce journey. I tell people, I probably would not have joined Salesforce if I hadn't been "acquired", but I ended up spending, gosh, almost 12 years there, taught a variety of different roles, learned so much. I mean, Salesforce is a sales and marketing powerhouse. Mark Benioff is a genius. And so being able to work under him, learned from him really honed me into the market I'm today. Loved Salesforce, but about a year and a half ago, I was just ready for a change. I think COVID and the pandemic made people question what they wanted to do, and I kind of started looking out for what are some other companies that are doing disruptive things? I care a lot about product and product marketing for years and years at Salesforce. So product is really important to me, and I found Asana, which I felt was disrupting the way people work. Great product, great team, and I was ready to be a CMO and now here I am.
Kailey Raymond: I love it. I am also a massive fan of Asana. It really changes the way teams collaborate and work together. I love it. Most people don't know that they wanna be a marketer from a young age, so that's a...
Shannon Duffy: I was not cool. So, think about what you want. But it pays well and here I am.
Kailey Raymond: I like it. Those things go together well. So, you've been in the industry for quite a while and so I wanna get your take on some of the major trends that are happening today. We're firmly planted in Q2, 2024 is, we're here, we've arrived. Talk to me about some of the trends that are impacting marketing and customer engagement right now.
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, so I would say data, data, data. I think marketers have been talking about data for a long time. I think the landscape of data has changed exponentially with the addition of AI, and that then has changed the expectation of your leadership team, but also more importantly your customers of how you can use that for even more hyper-personalization and better customer experiences. So I wouldn't say it's like a new trend, but it is a, what's the word I'm looking for? Like a hyper-charged of a trend and something that marketers have been talking about for a while.
Kailey Raymond: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's also like the cookieless thing. It's so funny. It's like, when is it actually gonna happen? But it does. Yeah, it's the thrust of data is everything that marketers are talking about today. We're gonna circle back, we're gonna go back to AI, and I just wanna make sure that we're talking about like this misalignment, I think, that's happening right now with brands and the cornerstone of trust and loyalty as it relates to data. So I think that that's kind of one of the reasons, perhaps the catalyst of this trend is, you wanna make sure you're feeling really close to your customers. And we just released our state of customer engagement report here at Twilio. We found that 81% of brands say that they have a deep understanding of their customers, but only 46% of customers agree. And so there's this interesting trust gap.
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, I don't know who those people are with that 81%. That seems like...
Kailey Raymond: Feeling a little overconfident, right?
Shannon Duffy: A little overconfident, yeah.
Kailey Raymond: Yeah. Obviously, we wanna break down those silos and make sure that the companies and the perception of customers are getting closer and closer so that gap is narrowing. And to your point, it all has to kind of do with data and data-driven personalization is the path forward to making sure that that gap closes. Beyond the trends that we're talking about of overarching customer engagement, what about B2B? Any trends that you're looking at for B2B?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, I mean, I live in the B2B world, so I think about this a lot. I mean, I think the trend for me, and maybe this isn't a trend, but it's really around speed and how can you get to your customers with that personalized message faster than anyone else? Well, how do you do that? Well, you need to break down the silos within your organization. You need to make sure your entire company is thinking, speaking, acting, valuing the same things as it relates to that overall customer experience. So, that's one trend. The other thing is it's like, B2B, B2C, it's like they're all people and they're all at different stages of their own career journey, which actually relates to the way you sell them.
Shannon Duffy: So what I mean by that is, from an Asana perspective, we have two businesses or we've had two businesses, or the one at the end of the day around sort of like this PLG growth model and then this SLG tops down. Well, the thing is, the people are all the same people. Their entry point is different. And so how do we think of them as a collective? How do we think of their journey as one thing and they are as one person, but just reach them with the right message at the right time, not thinking of them as completely different people despite how they might have experienced our product for the first time?
Kailey Raymond: And I think what you're talking about really right now is almost this like consumerization effect, which has obviously catalyzed with this mega trend of personalization and now we've kind of fully crossed over from B2C to B2B where, unlike in B2C, maybe you're influencing one person, maybe a household are the biggest group of people that you might be influencing, in B2B, multiple departments, multiple OKRs, different budgets, sometimes they have entirely different data silos that they're making decisions off of. So I wanna learn from you, you mentioned SLG and PLG and you are obviously a really interesting example of a business that's really uniquely suited to both models and both entry points. You're serving customers, I'm sure, at every kind of stage, from enterprise to these tiny little companies. So, tell me how you think about delivering those right signals to the right teams to ensure that you can do that path of least friction to your customers.
Shannon Duffy: Well, I mean data is a big part of that, understanding the customers from a data perspective. But I wanna say, human connection is irreplaceable. And I actually think, with AI, it's going to be even more important. And I think what we're seeing is, after years and years of the pandemic, people want that human connection. And when you think of a B2B buying decision, it is complex. It is hard. It might be scary for someone to make a decision of one type of software over another. Like what does that mean for their career, their trajectory? And that's why the human touchpoints are really there to provide that air cover and work hand in hand with those data touchpoints to provide the most amazing customer experience for B2B buyers.
Kailey Raymond: That makes total sense. And I'm wondering how those touchpoints kind of happen at Asana. Are there any moments in that journey where you're like, here's the handoff that we're really proud of that's reducing that friction in this journey and making sure that we're capturing those insights from human beings and delivering it back into the product and having this virtual little cycle?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, I mean there's so many ways we do it. I mean, we work really closely with sort of our SDR and BDR team to see what are the signals, what are people responding to, but also making sure we're giving them the things, giving them those human touchpoint. Here are our events, here are our first party events, our third party events. We have something called our work innovation center where we can actually take data from how people are using Asana, the actual Asana product, and we can give them their customized collaboration score. So the data is telling us, hey, these companies are using Asana. Here are some things that they could do better. That's something we can actually reach out to companies and be like, hey, let us talk to you. Let a human now walk you through these thoughts, these ideas, the ways you can get more out of collaboration, more out of Asana. So that's like two ways, the product data, the marketing data and the humans kind of work hand in hand.
Kailey Raymond: That's beautiful. It's a nice little feedback loop that you're creating and it really is, it's all about reducing that friction. And you mentioned this already with some of the implications of how AI might even fit into some of these motions. I told you we'll come back to it. I wanna ask your take on this. So Asana AI, it's really not like a promise anymore, it's something that's fully arrived now. ChatGPT has been in people's hands firmly for, what, a year and a half or so now. So tell me how you're testing AI in the customer journey. Are there any good use cases that you've seen so far?
Shannon Duffy: So, we are using AI at Asana to go faster and personalize more. I feel like very lucky that I chose to come to Asana right before ChatGPT exploded because the way our product was built, we have a data model called the Work Graph, enabled us to ship AI features right off the bat. And that's important because I use Asana every day. I run my business on Asana. So everything from being able to ask Asana a question and it will give me an answer on how a project or a campaign is performing, that is key, to automatically sending me a status when something might not be working. But really where I see, going back a few minutes, we talked about speed in B2B is going to be really important. Asana AI is helping us power our workflows to go faster.
Shannon Duffy: So, for example, the example I just gave you, let's say we are getting signals from the product that a company is getting either good or bad work innovation score that we wanna share with them. Instead of someone having to see that, AI can say that that's happening, kick off a workflow where the right sales person is notified and they can call that person right away. Like things like that are gonna really help us go faster and provide that better experience to customers because so many of the steps that are important and take time are gonna be automated and these workflows are gonna be created to expand customer connections.
Kailey Raymond: Wow, that's really interesting. And I'm imagining a world of Asana user, Asana fan over here. We have these templates of campaigns, say it's a webinar, and you're having a task that's saying write email copy, and you're having another task that's like creative for email banner or whatever. Having those AI agents be able to actually do those tasks and the humans be the ones that are the feedback loop and saying like yes or no and making the approval process, like the AI to human and back and forth and that, like that...
Shannon Duffy: Absolutely.
Kailey Raymond: So, so, so interesting.
Shannon Duffy: Absolutely. Like it will say, and we'll look at past things in Asana again, Asana, we're not a data company, but we have all the work data right in one place and that's where you need data to make AI work. It can look back at emails to similar audiences that have performed well and create, write the email for you based off of what it think it's gonna perform the best. Like, just think of that. As in, there we're times you spent writing an email and hoping and being like, oh, we need to AB test that. All of that stuff has completely gone away.
Kailey Raymond: Mind blowing. I love it. One of the things that we're really excited about as it relates to AI is predictive analytics as well. One of the things here at Segment that we're seeing is, again, this customer engagement report that we just put out. There's 70% of companies are saying that they're using AI obviously to help drive personalization, to drive engagement, and they're seeing really great outcomes. One of which is that 41% of those companies are saying that they're improving their targeting and their segmentation. And so here at Segment, predictive audiences, allowing people to have that out of the box experience with models like LTV or churn risk and predict those future customer behaviors. As a marketer, forever, I've been looking at past data. And you're talking about the importance of real time and making sure you're hitting people before. Imagine having that magic eight ball and being able to have the insight of what somebody's about to do. Like that's some of the AI implications that I'm like, that's gonna be really fun to watch.
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, that's amazing. And as soon as that starts happening, companies are gonna expect companies to do that. Does that make sense? It's like, as soon as someone does that once, everyone's gonna be like, I want my experience to be like that, where you predict what I want, what I need before I even know.
Kailey Raymond: Yeah. It's the expectation, right? It's like, once somebody does it, it's the Amazon effect. Once you had that magical customer experience that started happening in, what, like 2005 when Prime started, then that became the expectation. The consumerization that we've been talking about is something that is in full force, and now B2B has to contend with that.
[music]
Producer: This podcast is brought to you by Twilio Segment. Great customer experiences require better data. With customer profiles that update in real time whenever new signals emerge, like when a customer adds new shoes to their cart, and a suite of best in class privacy features that ensures your respecting your customer's data privacy every time, Segment allows you to make good data available to every team so that they can deliver personalized customer experiences at scale and at exactly the right moment. Cue that cart abandoner email. Twilio's Segment helps over 25,000 companies power their most important objectives with data they can trust. Are you interested in learning how to build stronger customer relationships and greater profitability with a complete understanding of every individual customer? Learn why everything is better with good data at segment.com/good-data.
Kailey Raymond: I'm wondering, you've said data, data, data, right? So the namesake of the show. How would you define good data?
Shannon Duffy: Oh, that's a great question. I think good data is deep. It is robust. It is good. It's good. It's not bad. And most importantly, it is usable. Because you can have as much data as you want, but if you can't actually use it, it doesn't mean anything. So how are you empowering your teams to actually gain access to it and how are you using the data to make decisions, or in the spirit of AI, having AI help you make decisions because of the data that you have?
Kailey Raymond: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the fact that... Also, going back to your point around real time, it's like, real time implies a lot of things. It implies that you're able to enrich these profiles and make sure you're having a lot of the channels that you're making sure that you're gaining a lot of the information from them, is piping back into your customer profiles and you're able, to your point, action on that in real time. That's also building a comprehensive view of the customer so that you can trust that and that you can make sure that you're having that gap that we talked about close. I'm wondering if you have examples of good data and the programs or tactics that you're leveraging with that good data.
Shannon Duffy: So we are using data to uncover business opportunities, which buyers, which markets, what do we go after? Like we're still, the work management space is really still kind of new, and so how do we use data just to make better business decisions? But most importantly we're using it to improve our overall customer experience. Like I am building... Or it's really important to me that my teams have a culture of data. Like how is this woven into the fabric of our marketing org? It's not just enough to do, you have to make sure it is performing and you have to make sure it is resonating with your customers. And it's not just like, did this do well or did not? If it's not doing well, it's not resonating with their customers.
Shannon Duffy: So, I mean, we do everything from lead scoring, making sure we're leveraging a data-driven model. So all the marketing signals are in one place, super, super important for that customer experience. Super important to make sure we're speaking the language of our customers and we're giving them what they need and send off maybe someone else. And of course, we do a lot of paid media and so data is really, really important for us that we are serving the right ad at the right time and leveraging all that data we have to get people to join our Asana family.
Kailey Raymond: Totally. And one of the ones that I always love with ads as well is that ability to make sure that, especially when we're talking about buying committees, we're able to influence the right people that might be at different stages and making sure, building that groundswell of momentum within an account. It's a really interesting ABM tactic as well to make sure you can continue to move people down that intent funnel. One of the things that you said that I want to underscore, which is really important, is that it's almost like you're not treating data as just like a tool, but you're treating it as like this common language across the team. And it's something that everybody can reference back and fully speak to each other, leveraging this language of data to make really great decisions. I love that. I think that's just a really great concept and idea. I'm wondering if you have an idea or an example of where data might have helped surface something that surprised you?
Shannon Duffy: Yes. I think when you're in marketing, you're always trying to prove your worth and your value, because you think of companies' budgets. Marketing usually is one of the bigger budgets. And so, we recently used data to help uncover that sales deals are 30% more likely to close when three or more people from the same account engage with marketing programs. That's huge. And then they're 40% more likely to close when an account engages with four or more marketing programs. So what that tells me is our marketing is working, yay, go marketing. But also, it's, again, how do we use data to get the right people in an account engaged with the right thing that we have? Like we have a variety of marketing programs. We have paid media, we have content, we have events, we have all the things. And so, how are we finding that right mix? How are we targeting the right people and getting accounts engaged so we can help our sales team sell?
Kailey Raymond: This is some serious ABM knowledge right now. And it's a really critical insight. So, if anybody listening has ever been in a room and they're talking about attribution, this is one of the conversations that you should be having, which is, how can you turn the conversation away from something like last touch or sourced? It was me versus you. Like that isn't a common language that drives revenue. Revenue is a team sport. And if you can talk about things like influence, then you're getting way closer to being able to do that handshake that makes sense between sales and marketing. So, I love that you're thinking about things like the speed of the deal and how marketing is influencing that, the number of touch points and the channels and where those channels might fit into the journey.
Shannon Duffy: Most people aren't going to buy a really complex B2B software. They're not going to enter into it with one webinar. That's not how people buy.
Kailey Raymond: No, it's not. But I do think that that can be a common misperception, right? And it's like the MQL funnel, right? And you're seeing all of these leads come in. But when you're talking in ABM language, it becomes something that is a GTM strategy, rather than this, like, thanks for the one lead. I think it's like an entire orientation of how you need to think that the company orients themselves in a certain direction. What are you focusing your teams on? You've mentioned the need for this customer centricity, this need for this human connection. I'm wondering if there's any programs, channels or tactics that you're telling your team to really lean into with a lot of that insight in mind?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, one thing we've really been focused, because again, we have a lot of data because our sort of PLG roots. The beauty of that is we have so much data and we've done so much AB testing and we know how people interact with the product. But as we shifted our model, we need to talk to customers. We have the data, but we actually have to speak to customers and get their insights and meet with them in person, build those relationships. So, over the past year, we've been actually focused on building out an event strategy. So, obviously there's third-party events. Everyone does those. But we kicked off a program last year called our Work Innovation Summit to make the event about Asana and AI, and how we're leveraging AI to transform our product and therefore help our businesses and our customers transform the way they work. And so, we did two tests. We did one in London and one in New York. They were wildly successful.
Shannon Duffy: Now we're doing nine across the globe this year. We have blown out the registration goal for every single one we've had so far, which tells me, not only are people, do they want to learn about Asana and they want to learn about how AI can change the way they were, they're also craving that human connection and they want those people, they want those companies to be the trusted advisor for them as they make these purchasing decisions. So, that's one thing. And then on the other side, we're really working with our prospects. We have a trial experience. So a lot of people, the front door to Asana is they see an ad and they sign up for a trial. And so we're looking to use really that data and the wins that we know from our PLG motion and find the optimal time for getting our sellers in front of them. So whether you meet us at an event or you come through a trial and you're tinkering with the product, like how do we give the signal to sales that maybe it's time to engage and again, be that trusted advisor, build that human relationship?
Kailey Raymond: And I do love this through line for you, which is this like human relationship. And I'm wondering if there's any like, how do you take the information that you're gleaning from an event and having that real human connection and conversation and bring it back into a customer profile and insight to make sure that you're delivering that experience back to them?
Shannon Duffy: Well, and here's what's amazing. AI has actually made that better. Because with the AI, we can take, you can record a sales call or you can take the notes or have something automate the notes and then you can put that in AI, you put that in Asana. That's, again, the beauty of Asana AI, it's all real. You can put it in and be like, what are the key insights that we heard from our marketing ICP, our ops ICP, our CIO ICP? And it really is an amazing way to automate and get the most out of those human interactions by getting that summary that then you can use as a data point for other things. Like it is actually this amazing flywheel that I think is just marketers are just beginning to grasp, but it's going to fundamentally change the way we engage with people.
Kailey Raymond: I love this example. It's really similar. I was talking to the CMO of Active Campaign a little while ago, and he was saying something about how he still has open forms in his response fields to say, like, how did you hear about us? Because he can actually leverage AI now and NLP to be able to gather those insights and aggregate it into a format that is actually legible and understandable, and he can build charts with. And so it's this thing that you probably wouldn't have done two years ago, five years ago, certainly because you want to have that really clean and rigid data. But NLP takes us to a new place where you can actually kind of go back to this, the way that you speak, the way that humans interact and they want to write a question.
Shannon Duffy: Absolutely. And it really aligns with the way Asana thinks about AI. It's like, we believe AI is going to make the human work better and unlock creativity and experimentation. And so it's like, how does humans and AIs work together? This is a perfect example of that.
Kailey Raymond: I love that. It's a really, really interesting example because I do think that that pairing of real life data and that really rich, robust relationship that you can have and then bringing it back to the digital world can be so challenging. But when you think about how you can insert AI into it, everything becomes a little bit easier. Okay, so events, obviously, thriving post-COVID world. That's awesome to hear that you're oversubscribing in your event strategy. Very, very cool. What changes do you see on the horizon for customer engagement in the next year or so?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah. So I would say personalization at scale. It's not a new concept, but it's going to a must-have, not a nice-to-have, because those who can figure out how to unlock AI are the ones that are going to win, full stop. So again, it's like, if you're not doing it, you need to do it now. I think immersive, interactive experiences, again, going back to that human connection, like how do I engage in different ways? Like one thing we're experimenting with, so our Work Graph, again, is sort of the connection of all the customer's work. We've created a VR experience where they can walk through their Work Graph in real time. Super cool.
Kailey Raymond: Wait, wait, wait, Walk me through that. What's happening?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah. So our data model is the Work Graph. And the Work Graph is this amazing thing that connects the tasks and the project and the portfolios and the people and the departments. That's why Asana is so wonderful because we can connect things in a really seamless way. And what we've been able to do is we'll have data on Twilio Segments Work Graph. And we can put it into a VR experience where you can walk through. And so you can walk through and see how connected marketing is to sales, how projects with HR are connected to finance. It's just a really, really cool way to bring the power of what we're doing to life in a way that's different from me showing it to you on a side.
Kailey Raymond: Whoa, So I'm like walking down the digital halls of like the workplace?
Shannon Duffy: Yeah, you're walking down your virtual digital halls in this like crazy universe that has no bounds.
Kailey Raymond: Whoa, okay. VR application that I hadn't considered yet unlocked.
Shannon Duffy: You'll have to come by. I'll walk you through yours. It's really cool.
Kailey Raymond: I love it. I love to see it. That's great. Very cool.
Shannon Duffy: I think the third thing is just customer centricity and empathetic human centered engagement. I think like those who can find that, those who can unlock AI, but most importantly, as I said, unlock the power of AI and humans together, they will win. Because, I mean, there's been times where I've been chatting with something. It's clearly a bot. Like it's clearly not doing... It's kind of doing what's supposed to, but not. And so those that can unlock what AI can do to accelerate things, make workflows go faster, but then layer on the humanness, the humanness that every single person is going to crave and expect, those are the ones that are going to win.
Kailey Raymond: Yeah, it's so true. Because, I mean, chatbots have been around for a very long time, and a lot of them are the prompts that are the same ones that you go every time you hit the website, you're seeing the same thing, and you're getting the same old responses. So making sure that you can really embed that human feeling back into it. And also your own data, right? So like your own little private LLM where you can actually have Asana's brand vibe and the way that you actually speak as a brand. So like making sure that you're feeding your language models with the content and the tones and everything that you actually speak with as a company is so important to be able to get that natural feeling back out to your consumers.
Shannon Duffy: Absolutely.
Kailey Raymond: What you're talking about sounds really simple, but it's not. It's all about like testing, learning, making sure you're encouraging that culture of being able to stand up and say, like, I want to try this. And it's okay if you fail. And it's okay that this is a learning experiment and it might not work. So how do you think about instilling that in your teams?
Shannon Duffy: So you have to celebrate failures. You have to celebrate, what did we learn? I would rather go fast, fail, and learn, than wait for perfection and go at a snail's pace. Companies can't afford to do that right now. I think the biggest piece of advice I have for people is put yourself in your customer's shoes, stay focused. My mentality with my team is better, better, never best. We are never done. We can always be better. That doesn't mean we don't celebrate the wins, we do, but again, we celebrate and then how we could make better. And then most importantly, how is what you are doing, whether you're in product marketing or revenue marketing or PR, how is what you are doing connected to everything else your peers are doing, because that's where the customer journey comes in. And believe it or not, you'd think like, oh, companies do that. Sometimes they don't, right? People get so in their silos. And again, it's the connection of that work. It's that combination of the marketing messaging being coherent and clear and put out in all channels that are really going to provide your customer experience.
Kailey Raymond: And this is why your VR Work Graph and being able to see your virtual how the connections and collaboration are actually happening is such a cool idea because you might be able to see those gaps of who isn't?
Shannon Duffy: Yes. Those people, you need to get on, you need to connect to each other to thrive. Talk, yes.
Kailey Raymond: Talk to each other. Very, very cool. Do you have any examples of folks that you look and you aspire to? You think that they're doing it right as it relates to building great customer journeys?
Shannon Duffy: We talked a little bit about Amazon. I think Amazon does a great job. But I really think, honestly, the frontier is open. Like in some ways, we're not... Square one is the wrong analogy, but like it's kind of leveled the playing field. And now it's like, okay who is going to adopt these? And so I'm really excited what Asana can do and I'm excited to see what other marketers are going to do as well.
Kailey Raymond: Yeah, you're right. We are kind of at the cusp of this new revolution, and if you aren't embracing it, then you probably will be left behind. So I'm stoked to see what's next. So, you mentioned your biggest piece of advice in terms of like better, better, best. I'm wondering, in terms of up-leveling customer experiences, any parting words for people?
Shannon Duffy: Stay focused on your customer and inspire your team to do great things. The opportunities marketing is going to have are endless, and this is what... We've trained for this, guys. We can take our human creativity and use the power of AI to build amazing experiences for our customers.
Kailey Raymond: I love it. Don't fear AI, embrace it. It is your partner.
Shannon Duffy: Yes.
Kailey Raymond: That's great. Shannon, thank you so much for being here. It is so incredible to hear what Asana is doing with AI. The future is bright.
[music]