Greg Kihlström is the Principal and Chief Strategist at GK5A, a marketing consultant agency in Arlington, VA. He’s a consultant to many C-level types and an expert in marketing. He also hosts The Agile Brand podcast and is the author of 11 books.

CDP has become a popular subject since the launch of Salesforce Genie, and in this episode, Greg shares a plethora of information about it. We talk about what CDP is, what the moving parts are, what it means to technical architects and developers, and more.

Greg is an insightful resource in the marketing and branding space. Listen in to learn from someone who is immersed in marketing and knows the ins and outs of CDPs and CRMs.

Show Highlights:

  • What an agile brand is and how it works with marketing and branding
  • What CDP stands for, and what it does
  • What the data points are that we apply back to the CDP
  • If there are regulations surrounding CDP for consumer privacy
  • What type of companies benefit from a CDP, and the risks of not using it
  • How Greg thinks generative AI impacts marketing

Links:

Episode Transcript

Greg Khilstrom:
Engineers are needed to make those connections and ensure that the systems are talking with one another, as well as to ensure that I’m not getting a text message, a phone call, and an email all at the same time. I think it’s that thing in the office. Faxes and all that stuff. You don’t want that, obviously.

Josh Birk:
That is Greg Khilstrom, principal over at GK5A. I’m Josh Birk, your host with the Salesforce Developer Podcast. Here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today, we’re actually going a little developer adjacent.
Greg is a consultant to many seed-level types. He’s an expert in marketing. He has his own podcast, The Agile Brand, as well as being an author of 11 books. And so, we are going to pick his brain on a topic that is gaining a lot of momentum now, CDP. We’re going to talk about what it is, what the moving parts are, why it’s blowing up so big, and what it means to technical architects and developers. But we’re going to kick things off as we often do with his early years.

Greg Khilstrom:
Right out of college, I got a job doing web design and print design and stuff like that. Second job out, I got a job at a tech startup. It was the original internet boom. Very late ’90s, early 2000s.

Josh Birk:
Got you.

Greg Khilstrom:
I got one of those web … I was a webmaster. I don’t even know if you can have that title anymore, but I taught myself HTML back in the day. And so, I was super excited. I thought I was going to be a billionaire from my couple thousand shares of a company you’ve never heard of.
What I loved about that experience was it really taught me that I love the intersection of … I love creative and UX and things like that, but I also love marketing and technology. And so, I got to be surrounded by engineers. The company was mostly engineers.
I worked very closely with a very talented marketing team that built a community of a million plus users from nothing and got excited about the marketing and the growth aspect. I always have surrounded myself since with technology engineers and things like that.

Josh Birk:
Got you. First of all, I’m very jealous of the title. It’s way cooler than any one I’ve ever had, and I’ve had, “Evangelist,” in my own title.

Greg Khilstrom:
Nice. Nice.

Josh Birk:
When I was at a certain insurance company, I think my title was Data Engineer III. When I got a raise and it was Data Engineer IV, my wife made the joke about it being an RPG at that point.

Greg Khilstrom:
Nice.

Josh Birk:
When I asked my boss what my job description actually was, he was like, “I could go look it up for you, but it mostly has to do with swapping out the reel-to-reels in the basement.” I’m like, “I did not do that.”

Greg Khilstrom:
Right.

Josh Birk:
Now, you have a podcast, The Agile Brand, which is also a book. One of your 11 books, I believe.

Greg Khilstrom:
Yep. Up to 11.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Just real quickly. What do you mean exactly by an Agile brand?

Greg Khilstrom:
I’m an Agile-certified coach and I’ve been through training in what I would call formal or big-A Agile. What I mean by Agile brand is it’s a broader definition than using Scrum or SAFe or things like that. It’s really a brand that is able to adapt its practices and its ability to manage change. Obviously, the last couple of years, we’ve all seen all kinds of change in all kinds of ways.
But as I mentioned, I got my start back pre-2001. How many economic downturns and crises have we been through since then? Brands have to be able to weather all of those kinds of things and thrive by changing and make plans that are prone to be changed. And so, an Agile brand is able to do that and all the while win customers and grow loyal lifetime customers.

Josh Birk:
Got it. I want to go down one level deeper on that. Because the engineer in me who has been on Agile teams and Scrum teams and done the Waterfall and done the weird combination of Agile-Waterfall, which I don’t know why anybody ever thought that was a good idea … How does that work in terms of marketing and brand strategy? Is it what I would think? What kind of things are going into considerations for velocity and stuff like that?

Greg Khilstrom:
What I would say is with marketing, as opposed to branding … With marketing, Agile principles work really well. Even Scrum can work really well. I’ve been part of teams where it hasn’t worked as well, but I’ve been part of many teams and actually set up Agile marketing programs where it has worked really well.
There’s a more direct correlation with software engineering and other things, where your marketing goal is the equivalent of, “We’re going to release a version of a software product.” It could be your goal for the quarter of the year, whatever it is. You iterate towards that. I think it actually translates well.
The goal may be, it could be the release of a website, which is a marketing channel. So it could be very closely-related to an engineering initiative. Or it could be we roll out a campaign. Or it could be a little more abstract, where we want customer growth. We want to grow our net promoter score by 10%, and we’re going to iterate towards that in sprints.

Josh Birk:
Got you.

Greg Khilstrom:
When it comes to branding, it gets a little different. I have plenty of friends in the branding world. When I told them I was writing this book, this was back in 2018, called The Agile Brand … They were like, “Wait. Wait. Wait. You can’t just change your brand all the time. You can’t change your logo in two-week sprints.”

Josh Birk:
Right.

Greg Khilstrom:
And so, I was like, “Duly noted.” There’s this duality within that, which is you do need to rethink how you’re targeting, how you’re positioning, and things like that in your brand. You don’t want to change your values. You don’t want to change your mission, certainly, on a two-week sprint basis.
But sometimes, you really don’t want to change your values ever. Those values are kind of there and baked in. And so, that’s kind of the difference with branding and Agile.

Josh Birk:
Well, I would also guess there’s a lot of … You’re just keeping the ship steady going forward, but you still need to do things like tracking your social engagement metrics, making sure your website views are correct, and all of that kind stuff.

Greg Khilstrom:
Right. To me, Agile and using a Scrum framework for marketing, it prevents marketers from being so reactive. Because I think the big buzzword of … What? 10-plus years ago. “Big data.” All of a sudden, we were collecting all this stuff like, “This is amazing. I get Google Analytics real-time.”
And so, we’re able to be super reactive. But to me, one of the benefits of thinking in these sprints is we can be methodical. We can be scientific about how we approach this. We don’t just say, “The campaign launched yesterday and it’s tanking. Let’s scrap everything and start over.”
We can say, “You know what? This is an experiment. It’s running for X amount of days. We’re not going to do anything intentionally until we get statistically significant data. And then, we’ll do something.” Smart marketers have been doing this for years. Not necessarily, using Scrum, but I think Scrum gives a framework for anyone to be able to do that.

Josh Birk:
Now, I feel like just mentioning big data is a great segue into talking about CDP. But as a fellow podcaster, I just want to ask this question. When did you first decide you want to have a podcast?

Greg Khilstrom:
The Agile Brand was really the first book that I put out. I was finishing it up and I thought, “I like the idea.” I think books are interesting in their own as far as the channel goes, but I wanted something to extend that and turn it into a little bit more of a conversation. As anything, it was an iterative thing.
My first year was very different. It was literally just me talking each week about a point, a chapter, or a thought in the book. And then, I slowly realized … You know what? I did a test with an interview with somebody else, and that one was a lot better received. And so, I just iterated from there. Now, it’s all interviews. Now, it’s three times a week versus one time a week and all that.

Josh Birk:
Thank you for tying that all together. Because we had to do the same thing. It’s kind of an Agile approach. We weren’t getting into Scrums and things like that, but it was a, “Well, let’s value change and see what happens,” kind of thing. It’s not going to hurt. All right.
Getting to the topic at hand, Salesforce has come strong with CDPs. We’re wrapping it into our Salesforce GD branding. We’re putting a bunch of stuff in the platform for it. But first, let’s level set for everybody. What exactly does CDP stand for and what does it do?

Greg Khilstrom:
Sure. A CDP is a customer data platform. Really, what it does is it gives brands additional views of their customers and allows them to stitch together customer data that previously was either near impossible to do or it was in a million different systems. Sometimes, in second or third parties that were very difficult to access and access in a consistent manner.
To me, a CDP is really … It’s that central source of truth about your customers. Where your sales team and other teams are using your CRM and need very specific information in there, your marketing team has a plethora of marketing channels. But the CDP is really that one single source of truth for a customer. It’s designed to capture a lot of things that just wouldn’t be appropriate to capture in other channels. Like the level of detail and the granularity and things like that.

Josh Birk:
Tell me a little bit more about that. Because having come from a world of CRM, Salesforce has our standard objects such as, “Here’s your data object model for what a business looks like.” What are some of the data points that we apply back to it with the CDP that’s valuable data for marketing?

Greg Khilstrom:
One way of looking at that would be … In some organizations, CRM traditionally started with the sales team. And so, there’s all the information that a salesperson needs too, “I talked with X person on this date.” Or, “This person went through the website and bought a product, submitted a form.” But it didn’t say that, “That person mentioned you on Twitter three days ago. There’s something interesting about the frequency that they’re talking about you.”
There’s the sentiment of their comments. Or there’s a level of detail that a salesperson or even a marketer that’s using the CRM for email marketing or other aspects, they don’t need to see that. And so, it’s just kind of clutter for them. And yet, with the right opportunity … Sometimes it’s not even people looking at the information in the CDP. Sometimes when we look at things like personalization, we can do very specific queries of, “Who has mentioned us on social 10 times in the last year? Let’s send them a specific offer. Or let’s show them something different on a specific communication channel.”
Therefore, it’s not a human going logging into a system and trying to find a list of these things. It’s machines talking to other machines, pulling lists of data. This is where the data lakes and the data warehouses and all that come into play. We’re collecting all of this stuff. A CDP is meant to try to make some sense of all that. Tie the pieces together.

Josh Birk:
I’ve heard that described as moving into being able to create a digital footprint or a digital identity, which has almost more of a persona on top of the normal data. We’re talking about tracking people on social media and stuff like that. Where does privacy come into play with that? Are there times that CDP can go, for lack of a better term, evil?

Greg Khilstrom:
I think there needs to be rules. There are regulations like GDPR or CCPA and things like that, that regulate how we communicate in certain ways. And then, I think there’s just good standards and practices and appropriateness of communication. To your point, yes. Some of this is can be governed by a platform that is aware of GDPR, opt-in, and consent and things like that.
Another three-letter acronym is consent management platform. That’s tied into these things as well. But I think what you’re saying also … I work in a number of different industries and one of them is healthcare. And so, sometimes it’s not appropriate to send someone a message asking for something after they’ve just had treatment for a disease or something like that.
And so, some of this comes in. Humans are still needed in all of this process. A machine is going to be like, “Man. Their propensity score to buy is off the charts. We should really send them this message.” But then, sometimes you have to think about, “Well, what are they actually feeling and experiencing right now?”

Josh Birk:
I’ll point listeners back to episodes a couple weeks ago, where we were talking about ethical AIs. When I asked, “What’s an example of an AI going wrong?” The response was … Somebody sent a pizza commercial ad to somebody on a holiday in Germany, I believe it was, that’s based on the Nazi Holocaust. This is not when you want people thinking about pizza.
It’s exactly what you’re saying there. That’s why you need the human in the middle. That’s why you need that human element. Why do you think … Because I swear I had not heard the word CDP for years. And I’ve been in tech for a couple decades now. Are we at a tipping point? Did the tech get better? Why do you think we’re talking about this so much these days?

Greg Khilstrom:
A big reason is to do with the need for greater first party data. With Google deprecating third party cookies at … I don’t know. I didn’t check the news today. Let’s say, late 2024 at this point, but soon.

Josh Birk:
Right.

Greg Khilstrom:
Apple and Microsoft are already taking strides there. Mobile device tracking. All this stuff. For those less familiar with all of that, if you’ve been relying on third party data to do your advertising, programmatic, all of that stuff. It’s going to get a lot harder, a lot more expensive, and in some cases impossible to do it the way that you’ve been doing it within a matter at this point of months.
And so, this whole idea of first party data strategies. Brands that have been direct-to-consumer for years and years and years, they have it a little bit easier here. If you’ve had a loyalty program for decades, you have it a little bit easier. Let’s take an example of a CPG company that’s always sold through intermediaries and never direct-to-consumer.
Most of the time, unless they have a really strong loyalty program, they are buying third party data to do brand advertising. They don’t have a direct relationship with their customers. They need to start collecting their own first party. We can get into … Zero party is when someone actively gives you information. First party is when you collect it about them.
I kind of lump them into the same. Just call it first party data. Because we’ve got enough buzzwords at the moment, but brands need to start building this first party data. Whether they have a lot of it already or not. Because a big part of what they do, the trillion dollar ad industry is changing and turning on its head.

Josh Birk:
That’s really interesting. It kind of dives into my next question. Because again, somebody who’s been working with CRM and stuff. I think even saw a joke on Twitter a couple days ago about somebody wishing they had a personal CRM. A CRM just to track the people in their life sort of thing.
On a CDP level, is it a similar story? Is it something that almost any business should be looking for? Or is there a size of complexity? Where it’s like, “Oh no. Now, we really need a CDP.”

Greg Khilstrom:
If you’re a large business, you definitely need to be investing it. I would say small businesses can probably get by with a good CRM. They need a good CRM strategy and they need it to be set up well. A CDP may be overkill for them.

Josh Birk:
Got it.

Greg Khilstrom:
At this stage, I would say … I deal mostly with Fortune 1000s and up. All of them need to be doing this yesterday. If you’re slightly smaller than that, still you need to be thinking this through and doing it. B2B, it’s a little bit different. If you’re a larger organization and you’re a B2B, absolutely, you need a CDP.
Even though traditionally … I say, “Traditional,” because CDPs aren’t that old, but it’s been more B2C focused. Because I think CRMs do a great job with the things that B2B companies generally need. But again, those larger companies, they need to start doing this too. For the third party data reason alone that I just mentioned. I would say small, mid business, it’s something to keep your eye on.
There are some reasonable ways to get started in that realm. But if you’re a larger company, you’ve got to be ready to do this. Larger companies are also bigger targets for being out of compliance with things like the California CCPA, GDPR, and others.

Josh Birk:
Got you.

Greg Khilstrom:
And if you’re a very large company, you’re global. And so, there are these regulations popping up everywhere. They’re all different and it’s lots of fun.

Josh Birk:
Let me list these off, because I feel like maybe you have actually answered my next question. Because it’s, “What are the risks for a large company or medium-sized company for not doing this?” You’re going to start flying blind, because you don’t have your first party data. You have the risk of legal action and regulatory harm. Is there a third or a fourth?

Greg Khilstrom:
From a proactive standpoint, you risk falling behind your competitors. Because one of the big things that this holistic view of a customer allows is to do better personalization and really orchestrating the customer journey. A lot of what I do as a consultant is looking at customer data and customer data strategies and seeing, “How can we not only get someone through their first purchase experience, but how do we keep them? Grow them as customer lifetime value?”
I read the other day that, “Lifetime value,” is the buzzword of the year. Let me drop more buzzwords on you here. Reuters had some article about that, but it’s true. My most recent book, I spent a lot of time talking about it, because I’ve been in sales for ever since I started my marketing agency years back.
Anyone that’s been in sales knows it’s a lot easier to keep an existing happy customer than it is to win a new one. It’s a lot cheaper. It’s a lot easier. And so, I think brands are getting smarter about understanding this. Also, it’s going to get more expensive and harder to acquire new customers for, again, all that third party data deprecation. Retaining customers, growing customers becomes more and more important.

Josh Birk:
Got you. Now, a lot of the people you interview and talk to, they are C-level types. Obviously, marketing people would be interested in all of this. For the more technical people, I would think at least a technical architect, if not a developer, would benefit from having at least a working understanding of how these systems work. Have you seen those people in this kind of a conversation?

Greg Khilstrom:
Definitely. Data engineers, data scientists are critical in this. But more on the engineering side, definitely. Because they’re the ones that are connecting the dots. It’s engineering and data working together to figure out, “How do we, A, hook these systems together? B, how do we get the right data in the right place? And then, what do we do with it?”
Because with a CRM, I think it’s very clear in some cases where a salesperson can look in that data and make a phone call, send an email. Whatever the case may be. With a CDP, again, it’s not necessarily that someone’s looking in the CDP on a daily basis saying, “Who should I contact?” The CDP enables automated and personalized things to happen. And so, it is very engineering-dependent that those connections are made well, and the orchestrations are in place to enable the right thing to happen at the right time.

Josh Birk:
Because again, we’re not just talking about big data or a data lake or data warehouse or anything like that. For developers and architects, I would think the important part of CDP would be the peak. What is it that actually makes it a platform and actually a working mechanism that’s making people’s lives and jobs easier?

Greg Khilstrom:
Yeah. CDP, I would say it’s a fairly broad term. I think Gartner doesn’t even have a CDP quadrant because of that reason. There’s so many flavors of CDP. They can include, but they don’t always include a component of orchestration. And so, in other words, what do we do with the data?
Sometimes the CDP is really just collecting things, stitching profiles together, and then passing those off to other systems. But in other cases, they’re actually helping to make decisions of, “Well, this threshold was met on this factor. Trigger this to happen.” Whether that’s sending an email, showing content on a website, doing retargeting and advertising.
And so, engineers are needed to make those connections and ensure that the systems are talking with one another, as well as to ensure that I’m not getting a text message, a phone call, and an email all at the same time. I think it’s that thing in the office. Faxes and all that stuff. You don’t want that, obviously.

Josh Birk:
Yes. God. I’m blanking on his name. Daniel Hoechst. An episode I did with him, he was talking about this automated system he created to test if people were breaking limits. He was like, “It was great. Except it wouldn’t shut up.” Thinking of developers then. Now, you have a series of books that you’ve titled Agile Guides. You have one on customer data platforms. Who’s the intended audience for that?

Greg Khilstrom:
The guides are really for marketers primarily. My thinking there is really to provide in three hours or less, you can get up to speed on a topic. You can understand how to evaluate, buy, and implement a system. To provide a short guide to do that.

Josh Birk:
Got it. You talked about it a little bit, but give me the elevator pitch for your latest book, House of the Customer.

Greg Khilstrom:
House of the Customer. What I was trying to do here was … In my work as a consultant, like I said, marketers, we love our buzzwords and all those things. There’s these things, I refer to them in the book as our, “North star goals.” They’re one-to-one omnichannel personalization. There’s a lot in there, but that should be a goal. It should be that every individual gets their own personalized communication on their channel of choice.
Now, can most brands deliver on that today? Probably not. Most are struggling to do things across a couple of channels, if not one channel that is personalized, but it’s a north star that we should strive for. What I wanted to do there was set out … There’s four of those goals that I say every brand should be striving for. But then, how do we actually get there? How do we build a platform within our organization to actually get there and make progress towards it?
Because depending on where you are on that maturity scale, you may be at a one of four, but you can still make incremental progress towards that. I use the metaphor of a house to talk through the different areas that you need to shore up in your organization. Some people in their organizations may be really strong in certain areas and weaker in others. It gives you this framework to look at each area individually and see, “Well, where are we falling behind? Where are we maybe ahead of our competitors, and so on?”

Josh Birk:
Out of curiosity, you’ve published 11 books. What has it been like getting published?

Greg Khilstrom:
So I’m self-published.

Josh Birk:
Okay.

Greg Khilstrom:
And I love it.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Greg Khilstrom:
I’ve considered being more aggressive about pursuing a publisher before, but I like the freedom and flexibility. In all things, I prefer that. I owned a marketing agency for a while. I sold it about five years ago. Since then, I’m an independent consultant. Sometimes I’m part of a team. Sometimes I’m working directly with clients and things.
But I like the freedom and flexibility to be able to, “Right now, I’m really feeling like writing books and so I’m able to do it.” I love writing. And I love writing because I love researching. I like trying to share what I’ve done and learned, mistakes I’ve made, and all of the above.
But I may not feel like writing a couple books next year. So I want the freedom and flexibility to be able to do that. I see it as all … The podcast, all of that, it’s a way to share and learn and research.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Totally out of left field from all of this. We are trying to get all the buzzwords into the episode.

Greg Khilstrom:
Nice.

Josh Birk:
What do you think of generative AI when it comes to marketing in general? How do you think it might impact it?

Greg Khilstrom:
I know many companies that are already dipping their toes. I’ve tested a few things for my podcast, actually. It wasn’t a 100% fit, but I asked ChatGPT for some interview questions for a podcast. I would say four out of seven were good.

Josh Birk:
Really? Interesting.

Greg Khilstrom:
Three I had to just toss out. They were not relevant at all. I was just curious. I still do all of them myself, but I was curious. Again, a little over 50%. I’ve always thought this about AI and machine learning and stuff. I think when you think of it as human augmentation, it’s a really good thing and it can be a really positive thing.
When you think of it as replacement … First of all, it’s going to take some people’s jobs, but more likely it’s going to take part of people’s jobs. The part that they don’t like doing and humans aren’t really good at. And so, I don’t want to discount the fact that there is going to be some jobs lost, but I’m optimistic.
I’m hopeful that it will mean humans get to do more valuable work. And that may not be immediately for everybody, but I’m hopeful that that is how it will change. To more directly answer your question, I see people trying to use it in writing. Like I said, I tried it out myself. I see a lot of curiosity around image generation. I don’t know how successfully it’s being used, but a lot of people are thinking about this very heavily right now.

Josh Birk:
Do you think this is your next book?

Greg Khilstrom:
I’m thinking about writing a short one about some of these topics, to be honest.

Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. See the show notes for more information from Greg. Before we go, I did ask after Greg’s favorite non-technical hobby. It turns out when he walks away from a computer, he wants to get a little artsy.

Greg Khilstrom:
I like drawing in real life with a sharpie and stuff like that. I do that really as sort of to decompress a bit.

Josh Birk:
Very cool.

Greg Khilstrom:
I spend all day on a computer, so I just draw a bit and stuff like that.

Josh Birk:
Very cool. Well, Greg, that was a lot of fun. Thank you very much for the conversation and the information.

Greg Khilstrom:
Thanks so much for having me.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Greg for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and have links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again everybody, and I’ll talk to you next week.

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