“As the lines of traditional CRM have blurred, and as we acknowledge that our customers want us to interact with them in a consistent way at all these touchpoints, who will lead that? Who will help an organization actually manage and deliver that kind of consistent experience?

How does that brand experience all come together in a consistent way?

Someone needs to lead that, and that someone is the marketer.” -Scott McCorkle, CEO, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

On the Marketing Cloudcast, the marketing podcast from Salesforce, Joel Book and I regularly interview marketing leaders about changes in our industry and how marketers can better reach customers amid that change.

And on the latest episode, I think we’ve reached a new high point—both in the vision for the future shared and the insights that listeners can take away.

Available now is our exclusive podcast with Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and digital marketing visionary. You may have seen his thoughts in Forbes, in Adweek, in Venture Beat, or on the Dreamforce keynote stage.

You can download the episode on iTunes or Stitcher for free now, or preview it here:

Only have a minute? Check out these top takeaways from our episode. We’ve curated ten of Scott’s top quotes from the episode here.

1. “If we look at the most disruptive organizations in our marketplace today — like Uber, Fitbit, Airbnb, and others — what those organizations have done is taken the traditional idea of what it’s like to be a customer along with what’s it like to use a product that an organization produces. Then they have completely blurred the lines between those two concepts. Customer experience has become product experience, and that’s what is creating such massive disruption.” Tweet this.
2. “Ask yourself: How can we make any customer touchpoint delightful? That changes the way we think about applying the many wonderful tools we now have as digital marketers.” Tweet this.
3. “There’s no better way to understand customer needs than to ask them, ‘What do you need?’ To do that at the most fundamental levels of your marketing strategy is a lesson that all companies can learn.” Tweet this.
4. “As the lines of traditional CRM have blurred, and as we acknowledge that our customers want us to interact with them in a consistent way at all these touchpoints, who will lead that? Who will help an organization actually manage and deliver that kind of consistent experience? How does that brand experience all come together in a consistent way? Someone needs to lead that, and that someone is the marketer.” Tweet this.
5. “Interact with your customers, understand their business, be a partner, and bring ideas to the table.” Tweet this.
6. “A customer expects consistency. They expect interaction across any channel on which they interact with an organization to be the same, and for that organization to really demonstrate that they know that customer. That includes every touchpoint, whether it’s sales, service, or marketing. Customers just don’t care. The always-connected customer wants that consistent experience.” Tweet this.
7. “Marketing is never finished. If this were a podcast on how to implement an HR system, we would talk about a process that had a beginning, middle and end. Well, marketing doesn’t work that way. There’s always the next set of offers, content, optimization, segmentation, and ways to think about what our customers need.” Tweet this.
8. “We know we need to integrate data — customer purchase data, web behavior—and yes, we should definitely do that. But as we think about data we don’t have that we need, I’ve always thought the best way to learn more about your customers is to ask. That’s what customer-centric thinking does.” Tweet this.
9. “The one word that sums up the state of marketing to me today: Opportunity. The opportunity to lead, interact with customers better, increase the top line for our businesses — it’s all about opportunity. There is so much to do. All this progress that we’ve made is great, but there’s even more to do from the point we’ve all reached now. So, there’s never been a better time to be a marketer.” Tweet this.
10. “If I had 10% more marketing budget this year, but could only invest in one strategy or channel, I’d pick social advertising. What’s happening with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all the various identity-based social networks is one of the big reasons why some would say marketing tech is eating ad tech. Or marketing tech and ad tech are coming together in one integrated thought process to interact with customers.” Tweet this.

BONUS: Scott McCorkle’s Book Recommendation for Marketers

“I love technology. I’ve been in technology my entire professional career. I started programming when I was 12 years old. And I love the impact that technology has had on humanity, broadly.

The last book that I read—not my favorite book—is one I am going to encourage everyone to read because I think it’s important. It’s called Our Final Invention, which is a kind of ominous, apocalyptic title. But the book contains a great deal of discussion on artificial intelligence.

If humanity were to really create something artificially intelligent, this is something we should all understand, yet we all don’t understand. So I’m not saying I subscribe to apocalyptic views of artificial intelligence, but I am saying that if true intelligence and consciousness were to be created in a machine, which most pundits would view as ‘when,’ not ‘if,’ we need to understand what that means.”

That’s just scratching the surface of what we discussed with Scott McCorkle, CEO, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Get the full episode now on iTunes or Stitcher.

Tweet @youngheike with marketing questions or topics you’d like to see covered next on the Marketing Cloudcast.