April 2, 2025 • 44 mins
Mike Manheimer is the chief customer officer (CCO) at Postscript—and a soon-to-be first-time father. Postscript is a short message system (SMS) marketing platform powered by AI, designed to help e-commerce brands within the Shopify ecosystem build personalized connections with their customers to drive revenue. Mike entered the SaaS world straight out of college at a startup called WebPT, where he worked his way up to marketing director. After leaving WebPT, Mike held various leadership roles at Gainsight before serving as head of growth marketing at Front. He joined Postscript in 2021 as chief marketing officer and transitioned to his current role as chief customer officer in late 2024, leading both the marketing and customer teams.
In today’s episode, Alan and Mike discuss conversational commerce, exploring how SMS text messaging, chatbots, and voice assistants are transforming the shopping experience. They examine
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
Are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing?
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Beyond, where we talk about the questions that sparkchange and share ideas that challenge the status quo.
Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential.
(00:32):
Mike Mannheimer, who's the Chief Customer Officer at Postscript.
He leads both marketing and customer teams.
Postscript, as we'll talk about, is an advanced SMS marketing platform powered by AI,designed to help businesses build personalized connections with their customers through
the use of things like SMS.
Mike's also led marketing at prior companies in the technology space, and on today's show,we'll talk about SMS, social commerce, how SMS plays a role in social commerce,
(01:01):
how we should think about best of breed versus the consolidation across MarTech platformsand where the application of AI is entering the SMS world of channels that we use today as
marketers.
That and much more with Mike Mannheimer.
(01:26):
Well, Mike, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Alan.
I'm excited to be here.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you.
I guess before we get talking about business, I guess I should say congratulations on yourpending fatherhood or new addition.
How are you feeling?
I think you're only a few, a number of weeks away, right?
(01:48):
Yeah, we're four weeks out.
my, I've started my leave doc for my team.
So we're at that stage.
I feel great.
I'm so excited.
I really love learning new things and taking on new challenges.
And I think this is the ultimate challenge.
And so we are very prepared, but also recognizing that there is an unbelievable amount ofthings that we don't know.
(02:12):
And I'm excited, excited for the journey.
So yeah, I'm super, super pumped.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
mean, I'm a dad only of one.
but have done the early childhood thing.
It's something to savor.
And I'm sure everyone tells you this, but it does go by really fast.
(02:35):
So just really soak it in as much as you can.
Don't worry too much about the sleep.
Yeah, I'm very, very excited and know, Postscript is a fully remote company.
So it's nice to be able to have the opportunity to balance and work out of the home.
So I'm hopeful that that'll be, that'll be an extra, you know, a hack on top of all theother preparations that we've done.
(03:02):
I love it, I love it.
Well, let's get into it.
Let's talk a little bit about your career path.
You're the chief customer officer at PostScript, but where'd you get your start in yourcareer and kind of what were some of the chapters along the way?
Yeah, when I was graduating from college, it was right around the time that we were in theGreat Recession and there was almost no work for new grads.
(03:29):
Many of my most trusted professors implored me to go to grad school.
They're like, don't go into the market.
It's bad out there.
You're not going to like what you see.
Stay in college for a minute.
But I was ready to go into the real world.
And at the time, I
was looking for growth industries.
I found a early stage bootstrapped SaaS company that was starting in Phoenix, Arizona,where I live.
(03:57):
And I responded to a Craigslist advertisement actually, and joined this company as one ofthe first 10 employees and learned what software was, learned the SaaS business from
scratch.
And I've been in B2B SaaS ever since.
It was one of the luckiest.
most like serendipitous things that's ever happened to me and got the opportunity at thatcompany to touch a bunch of parts of the business that I had no business being involved
(04:26):
in, but that's the nature of a startup.
through those learnings was able to grow my career from there.
I ended up going into marketing and led the marketing team there slowly sort of continuedto find new
B2B SaaS environments to grow my skill set.
It is not traditional for a CMO to transition into a Chief Customer Officer role.
(04:55):
But at Postscript, the reason that makes sense is twofold.
One is our main customer that we sell to is a CMO, is a marketer at our customer accounts.
And so obviously having deep understanding and empathy for
what our customers go through is really important to being able to serve them effectively.
And then two, one step along my career trajectory was I worked at a company calledGainsight, which I think now has exited to Vista as part of the Vista PE portfolio.
(05:26):
But that company was a customer success software company.
I worked there for about five years.
And what we did while I was there was we defined what customer success was as aprofession.
And we were at the very,
tip of the spear there on that movement.
And so while I have never been a CSM myself, I definitely have been living in the CSMworld for a long time.
(05:51):
so, you know, as a result of that, that trajectory I was on when it came time to findleadership for our customer facing org at Postscript, you know, it made a little bit of
sense.
And so a lot of times I talked to other CMOs, they were like,
Tell me about the CCO move.
that your choice or theirs?
I'm like, no, it's actually, it's a great thing.
I still maintain leadership of the marketing org and I've added the customer org to it.
(06:16):
And there's actually a lot of really cool, unexpected synergistic benefits to being amarketer and servicing software that sells to marketers that makes it all make sense.
And so it's been a crazy journey and becoming CCO at Postscript kind of feels like the endof like a full circle moment.
for me.
No, that's awesome.
(06:37):
That's awesome.
I love the full circle moment.
Well, let's talk a little bit about Postscript.
what is the scope of the business?
What do you guys do?
Postscript is a revenue platform that's focused on SMS for the Shopify ecosystem.
So the TLDR is we use messaging tools to make Shopify merchants much more money throughsales.
(07:02):
And so the business is about six years old now.
We have over 300 employees.
We have over 20,000 customers on the Shopify.
platform using Postscript to communicate with their customers.
And it's been a crazy journey.
It's been lots and lots of fun.
(07:22):
think Postscript had started as kind of a product-led sort of anyone can use it, installfrom the app store, an upgrade type of business.
And over time, we've added lots of enterprise features to serve the enterprise in Shopifyas well.
And we have customers that are people just getting started selling their first goods onShopify, as well as the, you know, nine and 10 figure brands that sell on Shopify as well,
(07:52):
like Brooklyn in thrive, cosmetics, hex, clad, et cetera.
True classic teas.
The list goes on.
And so it's been a really crazy journey and lots of fun and have learned a ton over thelast four years that I've, that I've been a post script.
Awesome.
Well, you know, we've been hearing about, I think for some time now, this idea ofconversational commerce.
(08:18):
And it seems like with the combination of messaging and commerce platforms like Shopify,you guys are at the epicenter of this.
But tell me a little bit about how you think about conversational commerce and what shouldwe be thinking about?
Yeah, conversational commerce is a funny thing.
seems obvious to people that it's worth pursuing.
(08:41):
That's why it's been a hot topic for over a decade at this point.
It's above my pay grade to understand why all of the other attempts at conversationalcommerce haven't worked.
I think people often wonder, why don't we have a super app like they have in other partsof the world?
Or why aren't most transactions in the United States being done on mobile?
(09:01):
And cash doesn't even exist in some other.
other parts of the world.
And there's, think, a bunch of reasons for that to just get down to the way that Americansshop and, and our behavior online.
But we have not had like the product market fit of like the right software with the rightchannel to facilitate conversational commerce experience that makes sense and actually
(09:28):
reduces the friction associated with shopping and makes it more enjoyable.
for the person to shop.
when I joined Postscript, part of my thesis outside of the fact that I loved the customersand the people who were working on the problem is it just really felt like two megatrends
(09:49):
were intersecting and they're not going to stop intersecting.
One being more transactions are going to be done online over time, digital commercegrowing.
All you have to do is look at Shopify's stock chart to know that's true.
And then,
messaging as a major component of the way that people spend their time online, especiallyon their mobile device, messaging in a bunch of forms, but especially text messaging
(10:15):
dominates the time that people are using their mobile phones.
so Postscript exists at the intersection of both of those things.
And when I think about conversational commerce, people have tried it with apps, but thoseare really hard to get people to download and keep on their phone.
People have tried it like native to the platforms, but all of the social networks, peopleare there to engage with their friends or be entertained and shopping is kind of
(10:40):
tangential to that.
So it's always kind of felt like, know, round pegs, square hole type of situation.
And we really think that SMS is a kind of a dark horse channel in this environment, mostlybecause it has one thing that makes it incredibly special that people tend to
(11:00):
underestimate.
which is SMS is the only channel that exists for marketers that is fundamentally two wayfrom the get go.
you send, you look at a marketer's emails, right?
They send them from a no reply at email address.
you know, when you're doing an ad, you're not trying to get people to engage with the adnecessarily.
(11:23):
Although, you know, that helps add performance, but you're trying to drive them to a siteto have a singular sort of journey based experience.
And SMS is automatically two way from the jump.
And that surface area we think is why it's best suited to nail the conversational part ofconversational commerce.
(11:44):
And we're really excited to experiment with that, especially as it relates to whatcapabilities are being unlocked as a result of generative AI, which I know we'll talk
about at some point in this conference.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, this notion of SMS is naturally two way.
That totally makes sense.
(12:04):
What should marketers be thinking about that we're not thinking about or maybemisconceptions with SMS?
Yeah, the biggest one is I think marketers always struggle with this.
They always have struggled with assuming that their customers are going to behave the waythat they personally will behave.
(12:25):
And as a result of that, a lot of people, especially folks who haven't started trying totext message their customers, they assume that it's going to be incredibly intrusive.
The customers will be annoyed.
There's no way.
a good customer experience could come from this channel because that's where I text withmy significant other, my family, et cetera.
(12:48):
So I don't want brands to be in there.
The idea of like annoying my audience is a really big deal.
It's a big impediment to a lot of marketers exploring the channel.
And that's just not what we see at all.
Right.
Text for marketing use cases is not that way.
You can only text people if they double opt in to receiving your messages.
(13:13):
And so from the, from the beginning, any single person that you're going to do an SMScampaign to
has agreed to get that message.
There's nobody who should be getting a message that they didn't opt into.
And if you are messaging people that way, then you should come talk to us because whateveryour provider's allowing you to do might put you in hot water.
(13:33):
It's not allowed on the carrier pipes.
So first off, the entire ecosystem should be 100 % double opt-in.
Two, when we look at unsubscribed rates globally,
they're incredibly low because of that.
It's just like any other marketing channel.
If you're adding lots of value to people who agreed to get your marketing, guess what?
(13:56):
They like it.
that's worth pursuing for most brands is finding out what that means for you.
And it's not the same for every single brand.
But when you nail that, the voice, the value add, and the consent, then what you end upwith is a very highly engaged
high earning channel.
(14:18):
And a lot of people are finding that they're actually making more money off of a SMS listthat ends up being only one fifth of the size as the email list that they've been
cultivating over the last few years because of the integration with the phone, theimmediacy of the channel and the engagement that you're able to generate via the messaging
(14:38):
inbox as opposed to the email inbox.
And so I just think people assume
that nobody wants to text,
And what we see is that people not only like to get texts, they stay subscribed for a verylong time.
They buy a lot from brands that are texting them and shockingly, they will text you back.
And I think a lot of brands are really, really surprised to see their customers engageback over the text channel.
(15:04):
But that's probably the best signal you can get that it's a highly engaged audience whowants to deepen their relationship with your brand, which ultimately as a marketer, always
trying to find ways to get the relationship to be more connected.
And I can't think of a better way than learning how to be engaged in your most, yourcustomer's most intimate channel, which is in their text inbox.
(15:27):
Yeah, no, that's I really like the fact that like the notion of they'll text you back.
mean, to your point earlier, you were making like you got to get the voice right.
You got to use the channel in the appropriate way.
I think as marketers, I think we really need to make sure that we step back from all ofour other channels because this channel is unique in that regard.
(15:48):
Right.
Like how do you text your friends?
You know, I text my friends very conversational, shorthand back and forth.
It's not the traditional email that we might be used to.
conversational opportunity is completely untapped in, especially in North America.
(16:09):
Some of the data that we see, which surprises folks is that, but in some ways it's kind ofobvious when you think about what would it take for someone to jump over the hurdle of
texting a brand.
But what we see across our data, which we send billions of texts a year, so we have agreat global data set.
(16:30):
is that people who text a brand back buy four times as much from that brand than someonewho does not.
And so hurtling, finding out how to create enough value over this channel to get someoneto engage in a conversational relationship with your company is worth it, not just from a
customer experience point of view, but actually it affects the top line and bottom lineresults of your business.
(16:55):
And so we talk to our customers about that all the time that
Cracking the code on conversational for your brand is not just makes you feel good.
It's a financial imperative.
I love it.
All the big martech providers out there, they're pushing to add more channels.
Those include SMS in some cases.
As you think about best of breed versus consolidation of providers, how do you think aboutit?
(17:22):
What are you seeing in the marketplace?
Yeah, there's a couple dynamics here.
First, at Postscript, we only do SMS.
We've been focused on SMS only from the get-go.
And that is not a common, at least today, a common approach to being a MarTech vendor.
But there's some really good reasons for why we do that.
(17:44):
One is that we just believe that focus is going to drive innovation on the channel.
and we don't believe that email and SMS are the same thing.
And so I think those two core ideas have been baked into the values of the company.
(18:05):
The results that we see are that we generate significantly better results, not onlybecause of our technology, but also because of the strategy that our team is able to put
into the channel in partnership with our customers.
So it's not just about
the tech, although we do believe via our focus, we've developed the most innovativetechnology portfolio.
(18:28):
But, you know, as marketers on any channel know, if you put bad marketing into a highlyeffective channel, it's going, it's not going to automatically be incredibly effective.
So the strategic advice that we're able to offer to get brands to actually maximize what'shappening on a two way channel that's mobile first, which is totally unique.
(18:50):
allows us to unlock a ton of incremental results.
The other thing that I think people overlook when it comes to SMS is SMS is technically ausage based and it's a metered usage type of product.
And what I mean by that is every time you send a text, you have to pay.
There are fees associated with the carriers.
(19:11):
There are fees associated with the telecom infrastructure.
And so I think when people think of email, for example, as like a free channel wherethey're like, well,
If my numbers are down, we'll just send another email blast and it won't cost us anythingexcept my team's time.
When you send an incremental SMS, it does cost money.
And the result of that, which I think is really interesting is a lot of people have alarger SMS bill than they do an email bill.
(19:40):
And when you consolidate with a vendor and you have, you know, your one or two hours ofstrategy calls with them a month.
and they're spending 90, 95 % of their time talking to you about email performance whenactually the spend that's going into the channel is significantly weighted towards SMS and
you're getting, you know, what five minutes a month of advice on how to make this channel,you know, really saying, I think the merchants that are maximizing their total cost of
(20:10):
ownership, maximizing their ROI and the dollars that they're putting on all theirincremental channels.
are finding specialists to be able to deliver those results.
That's really where we kind of hang our hat on is via our focus on the technology and ourfocus on the strategy, we'll make an SMS dollar go a lot farther on Postscript than you
will on a kind of, you know, jack of all trades, master of none type platform.
(20:33):
And the other thing I'll add to that is the tools that we all use to integrate ourtechnology together.
are battle tested.
They've been around for a very, very long time.
And I think the integrations, as long as they're built effectively, are super robust.
They're two way, they're real time.
They don't leave almost nothing that is left to be desired from a orchestration point ofview.
(20:59):
You know, the entire software industry has been, you know, deeply integrated, especiallyin B2B software for many, many years now.
And so the gap between
Does this channel live inside of the platform or is this channel simply integrated intothe platform?
That gap today is incredibly narrow.
And I would say that it doesn't leave anything to be desired from a orchestration point ofview.
(21:23):
And so you kind of get the best of both worlds with, you know, our focused approach versusconsolidation.
Look, you've been in tech for a long time.
So have I.
We all know these are cycles, unbundling and bundling.
That's all the money's made.
He
I, it's obvious that we've been in a consolidation cycle for the last couple of years assoftware markets have been kind of more difficult and folks have been, you know, pressured
(21:46):
to reduce their overall spend on tools.
That's fine.
I expect that, you know, as the, the winds kind of change, consumer sentiment seems to bestrong and stabilizing that we'll see a, an unbundling cycle, especially as
AI unlocks all sorts of new capabilities on a bunch of tools.
(22:07):
think people, yeah, they want efficiency, they want savings, but I think what people wantmore than anything is growth.
And growth comes from innovative strategies, innovative technology, and those innovativestrategies and innovative technologies are more likely to exist on best of breed tools out
(22:28):
there.
And that's why we developed the strategy.
We've
developed and what I expect to see in the software market over the next few years.
Awesome.
Well, you mentioned AI earlier.
You just mentioned it again.
Let's talk a little bit about AI and how it's working its way into use cases for SMS.
(22:48):
What are you seeing?
Yeah, so there's there's two sides to it.
What we're developing is, guess I took a step back.
The thing that's really important to Postscript is to develop technology and innovationthat actually drives dollars for our customers.
We don't want to just do innovation for innovation sake.
(23:10):
That can be cool and shiny new object, but ultimately our customers are entrepreneurs.
They're building.
the next great set of brands, American brands.
And, you know, we want to make sure that we're always driving their results up and to theright.
And so that drives everything that we do.
How do we make people more money?
We've developed AI in two areas.
(23:31):
One is we rolled out a tool set that we call infinity testing.
basically changes the standard structure of an A B test and instead allows you to testhundreds of variations of messages against your control.
proven by a holdout test so that you can see the incrementality of what AI is doing.
(23:52):
And that scale allows marketers to, one, do something that they've never been able to dobefore, which is run statistically significant tests in the background using thousands of
variations, as opposed to doing a slow and cumbersome standard A-B test to unlock newresults and learnings about their campaigns and automations.
(24:13):
And our goal there is to increase earnings per message for our customers proven in the theholdout.
And the results have been amazing.
We have an automation's product in the campaigns product as well.
But ultimately, once that's set up and you're running it in the background, we're drivingupwards of 35 percent lift on earnings per message on Postscript.
(24:36):
So literally, if you take a campaign that you're going to run and you run it on
some SMS platforms pipes versus putting it on Postgres pipes and activating our AIproduct.
Our AI product will earn you 35 % more earnings from that same campaign than it willanywhere else.
And that's not as a result of our pipes are faster or our team is smarter.
(24:59):
This is actually the AI is going to find variants that are going to drive meaningful liftand those compound over time.
And so that's less of a...
conversational use case.
It's more of a generative to testing use case, but we find that to be really valuablebecause marketers are spending all of their time trying to run experiments to find new
(25:21):
insights.
And that process can be very slow and also result in lots of tests that are eitherinconclusive or don't show any lift.
And so this is a way to find lift quickly and scale the lift quickly.
And so that's the testing products that we've
developed for AI.
And SMS makes that easy because the medium is simply a short text message.
(25:47):
there was a full email or a full website or landing page or something like that, thosethings can be done, but they're a lot more complicated, especially to do on the fly.
And you probably have way more brand controls that you want to put into place.
But with texting, we can do this quickly.
We can verify that it's on brand in a much more narrow surface area.
(26:08):
And that allows us to move a lot faster.
other direction that we're building in with AI, which I think is kind of obvious and we'resuper, super excited about is the conversational aspects, the being able to help people
shop and help people handle their challenges while they're shopping.
Some of that can be as a result of them having questions.
(26:31):
Some of it can be as a result of them not being able to decide between two items.
There's educational components, et cetera.
But ultimately, if the AI is on brand and it understands the SKUs and it can understandthe voice and needs of your customers, then providing a conversational experience over
(26:51):
text to aid in the digital shopping experience is incredibly exciting for us.
The way we think about it is when you go to the mall or a store and you think of a veryconsultative in-store shopping experience.
The question would be how, what is the, what is the best version of that for onlineshopping that really hasn't been delivered.
(27:16):
You know, I've had some really great in-store shopping experiences, especially for veryconsultative things like, know, if you think about you go in and are looking for like new
golf clubs, it's like you're engaging with a sales associate on a, on a whole range of,uh, of, of variants.
that are personal, that they need to understand about you to be able to make a goodrecommendation.
(27:38):
And the tool sets that are available to do that online are pretty rigid comparatively.
And a conversational interface that understands your customers and your brand, I think,could go very far in not only helping to create a good customer experience, but drive
meaningful conversion.
And so Postscript is very focused on how to bring conversational into the center.
(28:03):
of the digital shopping experience.
There's some very cool things coming out later this year that'll make that easy andscalable for most of Postscript's customer base.
So we're really excited.
I think the conversational part of AI is, you can see it all over the place.
mean, there was a conversational AI company that ran a Super Bowl ad this year.
(28:25):
conversational being applied to all of these different use cases is obviously a growtharea.
Our goal is to develop the most on-brand, most effective conversational AI possible forSMS and e-commerce use cases.
And that's what we're really focused on delivering this year.
Awesome.
Well, I mean, it was super interesting to hear you talk about AI and the testing use caseas well.
(28:48):
I mean, that's a unique use case.
AI is uniquely situated to help solve, but I don't hear a lot of people actually using itfor that purpose.
So thanks for highlighting that, too.
I the conversation will make sense.
So I was tracking that.
understand that as well.
But I hadn't heard that one before.
(29:08):
That's pretty cool.
The testing use case is like a stepping stone to eventually getting to that one-to-onemarketing world that everyone wants, right?
Every marketer in the world, everyone who's listening to this, we all know that getting aperfect message to an individual person is the holy grail.
That's what we all want to do.
(29:29):
It's really difficult to make it there to find the exact highest performing message forevery single person.
And our infinity testing product is is one step in that direction, which is find thethemes that create better performance.
And we're going to continue down that path to find the themes, words, topics that createbetter performance.
(29:52):
And we'll continue to narrow it down on an individual basis.
The goal being eventually we can automatically craft a high performing text message forevery single person automatically inside of PostScript.
And so.
That's where we're going with it.
And we think that the infinity testing product set that we rolled out is a very meaningfulstep in getting to that real one-to-one marketing world that we all know is worth going
(30:18):
towards.
Awesome.
Well, one of the things I like to do on the show is get to know you a little bit better.
my favorite question to ask everybody that comes on the show is, has there been anexperience of your past that makes up who you are today?
Yeah.
When I think about an experience that has really defined who I am, this is probably acommon one, but when I was a kid, I moved a lot.
(30:44):
Both of my parents worked in the federal government, and if you know anything about thefederal government, if you want to get promoted, you typically have to move, and you're
moving all over the country, and eventually you get to DC, and then you move away from DC.
That's just the way it works.
And my family was no different.
And so I moved a lot when I was a kid and especially at some very formative points in mylife.
(31:10):
And so very quickly when I was young, I had to learn how to, you know, adapt and handlewhat I would consider to be, you know, a challenging situation.
Every time it happened, it was just a completely new environment where I had to kind offigure out where I fit in and what I wanted, what I wanted to be, who I wanted to be.
(31:31):
And those experiences, I think, were really formative.
some of the things that I think are really important to me from a values point of view inwork and in personal life about being open, adaptable, being curious, I found that to be
something that's really important to me.
(31:52):
And I think that that was kind of honed when I was being put into these environments whereit was a whole new set of variables every single time.
understand my surroundings, use not just IQ but EQ to figure out how to navigate in theworld.
And those experiences, I think, gave me a lot of tools that I use today, not just at work,but definitely in my personal relationships and how I experience life.
(32:23):
so, yeah, think moving a bunch when I was a kid,
really had a big effect on me.
There's no good times to move when you're a kid, especially if you're building a life.
But the one that was the craziest was my parents moved us to Arizona where I live nowright when I was in my junior year of high school, right about to be a senior.
(32:48):
That one was particularly challenging at that time.
That was just one of many.
But I think
like most things in life, you can, you know, you have some agency and how you perceivesome of those challenges.
it going to, are you going to take it as a, you know, a hundred percent of negative oryou're going to find a way to turn it into, you know, a positive sort of experience.
(33:11):
And that one was no different.
And, you know, it's just been, it's been a, been a journey.
And I, while those scenarios were not easy in the moment, I,
definitely wouldn't go back and change anything about him.
Well, thanks for sharing.
mean, those definitely those moves, especially as a teenager can be exceptionally toughwith social circles, etc.
(33:36):
So I appreciate you sharing.
If you were if you're starting this career trajectory all over again, is there any adviceyou give your younger self?
Yes, definitely.
When I was starting my career, I was very self-conscious about what I didn't know.
(33:57):
think in general, people would call that imposter syndrome.
That's a common thing people deal with.
Even when you move up in your career and have a bunch of experience, you get in with adifferent level of folks who have different backgrounds, different pedigrees.
can easily
easily doubt yourself.
And one of the things that I would tell my younger self that I learned along the way thatI found to be really helpful is just the idea that you're like telling yourself a story
(34:26):
about what's going on or what people particularly think about you.
But the truth is that nobody's thinking about you at all.
They're way too busy thinking about themselves.
so this idea that you're being judged or scrutinized all of the time, or I bet
somebody saw me make this little mistake and they're wondering if I'm the right person forthe job as a result of that.
(34:51):
That's all just in your head.
And the truth is that no one thinks about you at all.
that I found when I eventually got to the point where I realized that was true, that feltreally freeing to me.
It felt like, if no one's really thinking about me all the time and analyzing what I'mdoing the way I'm analyzing it to myself, then.
(35:11):
that gives me the freedom to try to make an impact that will resonate or will create sortof the attention that I want.
So yeah, if I could go back in time, I would tell young Mike, hey, don't worry about thepeople talking about you.
They're not talking about you at all.
(35:33):
Don't worry about it.
love it.
I feel like that's a good lesson for marketers too.
Like no one's talking about our brands, right?
Like very few of our brands are they really talking about.
So yeah, we gotta get, we gotta own our message, get it out there.
Well, is there a topic you think marketers need to be learning more about or maybe it'ssomething you're trying to learn more about yourself right now?
(35:55):
Yeah, I think there's a level of like statistics in analytics that I definitely didn't seeuntil I was in e-commerce.
So before I was at Postscript, which sells to e-commerce marketers, I've just been ingeneral enterprise, B2B SaaS environments mostly.
And there's so much of a focus on attribution and analytics and media buying and in e-commthat's kind of what makes the industry go around.
(36:24):
When I started getting into e-commerce, I realized there was a level of understanding ofeffectiveness of these channels from a marketing point of view that in my prior companies,
we just weren't at that level of maturity.
And as I started to dig into it more, I realized that a lot of the folks who are leadingin analytics or incrementality or now what's coming down,
(36:52):
into that world is causal AI.
So AI paired with some of these, you know, hardcore statistical models to create modelsfor marketing effectiveness.
You know, the people who are running those companies now are like full on scientists.
And so I think that, you know, the world is going towards AI handling a lot more of thatfor us.
(37:18):
But I think the interpretation of those results
and being able to understand what you're looking at is going to be, as it scales up insophistication, it's going to be really difficult for marketers, I think, to understand
what really the AI is telling them in this new world.
And so I think I could have paid a lot more attention to my stats class in college.
(37:42):
I'm sure everyone probably could have.
But what I'm seeing on the bleeding edge of
attribution, incrementality, AI, where that world's going for marketing use cases.
It's pretty scientific.
It's pretty sophisticated.
And I think everyone in marketing to prepare for that could do a little bit of a brush upon how to think about their, know, dust off their old statistics textbooks and get
(38:07):
reacquainted with that world.
Because I think a new level of sophistication and measurement is coming to marketing asit's being enabled by AI.
And so that's something that's like on my mind and I'm seeing a lot of the bleeding edgestuff affecting the e-commerce world right now, not only with companies, but also just
(38:27):
with people who are at our customers who are incredibly sophisticated with the way thatthey think about measurement.
Yeah, no, I agree.
think that's really good advice.
Folks that work with me know I geek out.
used to manage market research for companies.
yeah, it's I believe everyone needs to have some base level understanding of stats and howto apply them, how to interpret them, etc.
(38:50):
I think, yeah, I totally agree with you.
It's a great, great suggestion.
As you think about like any trends or subcultures that you follow, you think other peopleshould take notice of anything come to mind?
Trend wise, one of the things I'm paying attention to is I think in general, there's amove towards analog IRL sort of experiences and goods.
(39:15):
Like we've been in this digital wave for a long time now.
And I think what I see is, you you can see it in a bunch of different areas.
There's like a renewed interest in, you know, in aesthetics that show up in like
you know, clothing and interior design, there's a renewed interest in more analog things.
(39:37):
You could see it like car design, right?
It's like people are doing more like retro styled cars that people want like lesstechnology and more of an experience.
You can see it in like events and experiences are, you know, the reaction to everythingbeing digital a few years ago is very much like get out in the world in person.
(39:57):
You can see it in people's like music consumption, like vinyl is the number one growingmedium for listening to music.
so I, in general, I think I'm just paying attention to the way that culture reacts to the,you know, prevailing, you know, media methods at any given time.
(40:21):
And I think we're at a point now where everyone's been
living in a technology enabled sort of digital world for enough time now that I thinkwe'll start to see a lot more the other end of the cycle, which is how can I get more
offline?
How can I get more analog experiences?
How can I connect with things that are less digital?
(40:44):
And I see that as a, know, it's not an emerging trend, it's been a trend, but I see itcontinuing.
to drive really interesting opportunities for marketers and definitely a different sort oflike consumption style for, you know, the younger consumers that are influencing more and
more of our culture and ecosystem.
And so that's definitely something that I'm paying close attention to.
(41:07):
Last question for you, what do you think is the largest opportunity or threat facingmarketers today?
Yeah, I think the it'd be impossible to answer this question without talking about AI inthis particular moment.
But I do not think that marketers are in in danger of losing their jobs or theirprofessions.
I really subscribe to the idea that like, AI is not going to take your job somebody who'sreally good at AI is going to take your job.
(41:33):
And so I think the biggest threat to marketers is
full on throwing out the baby with the bathwater and rejecting what's coming with AI.
think there's lots of creative ways to use it.
I think the off the shelf tools are not good enough.
And I think the marketers that'll really end up succeeding in this new world are figuringout how to take the off the shelf tools and build something with AI that will uniquely
(42:01):
help their companies do whatever job they're trying to do.
And that's going to require you to be as a marketer, like an AI first thinker andunderstand what capabilities you have in your tool chest to be able to deliver a good
marketing outcome.
So the, the big threat would be, can't, you can't put your head in the sand.
This is coming.
(42:21):
There's no way around it.
The question is just how you respond.
And I think that if you're open and excited to experiment with what's out there, you'llfind that there's tons of ways.
where what's coming with AI, what's here with AI today can make you a more effective, morecreative marketer as opposed to responding in fear and being worried about it, removing
(42:47):
the profession entirely.
don't think that's ever going to happen.
I would say this is a moment to really, really lean in.
Well, that notion of human plus machine, think is the right notion.
Mike, thanks for coming on the show.
Congratulations again, and I wish you luck in the coming weeks as you prepare for that newedition.
(43:11):
Yeah, super excited and I appreciate you bringing me on the show.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent theviews, thoughts, and opinions of Deloitte.
The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only anddoes not imply endorsement or opposition to any specific company, product, or service.
(43:38):
Hi, it's Alan again.
Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte digital podcast.
It's created and produced by me with post-production support from Sam Robertson.
If you're new to Marketing Beyond, please feel free to write us a review and subscribe onyour favorite listening platform.
I also invite you to explore the other Deloitte digital podcast at deloittedigital.comslash podcast and share the show with your friends and colleagues.
(44:04):
I love hearing from listeners.
marketingbeyond at deloitte.com.
You'll also find complete show notes and links to what we discussed in the episode today,and you can search our archives.
I'm Alan Hart, and this is Marketing Beyond.
Are you ready to go beyond the basics of marketing?
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Beyond, where we talk about the questions that sparkchange and share ideas that challenge the status quo.
Join us as we explore the future of marketing and its endless potential.
(00:32):
Mike Mannheimer, who's the Chief Customer Officer at Postscript.
He leads both marketing and customer teams.
Postscript, as we'll talk about, is an advanced SMS marketing platform powered by AI,designed to help businesses build personalized connections with their customers through
the use of things like SMS.
Mike's also led marketing at prior companies in the technology space, and on today's show,we'll talk about SMS, social commerce, how SMS plays a role in social commerce,
(01:01):
how we should think about best of breed versus the consolidation across MarTech platformsand where the application of AI is entering the SMS world of channels that we use today as
marketers.
That and much more with Mike Mannheimer.
(01:26):
Well, Mike, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Alan.
I'm excited to be here.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you.
I guess before we get talking about business, I guess I should say congratulations on yourpending fatherhood or new addition.
How are you feeling?
I think you're only a few, a number of weeks away, right?
(01:48):
Yeah, we're four weeks out.
my, I've started my leave doc for my team.
So we're at that stage.
I feel great.
I'm so excited.
I really love learning new things and taking on new challenges.
And I think this is the ultimate challenge.
And so we are very prepared, but also recognizing that there is an unbelievable amount ofthings that we don't know.
(02:12):
And I'm excited, excited for the journey.
So yeah, I'm super, super pumped.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
mean, I'm a dad only of one.
but have done the early childhood thing.
It's something to savor.
And I'm sure everyone tells you this, but it does go by really fast.
(02:35):
So just really soak it in as much as you can.
Don't worry too much about the sleep.
Yeah, I'm very, very excited and know, Postscript is a fully remote company.
So it's nice to be able to have the opportunity to balance and work out of the home.
So I'm hopeful that that'll be, that'll be an extra, you know, a hack on top of all theother preparations that we've done.
(03:02):
I love it, I love it.
Well, let's get into it.
Let's talk a little bit about your career path.
You're the chief customer officer at PostScript, but where'd you get your start in yourcareer and kind of what were some of the chapters along the way?
Yeah, when I was graduating from college, it was right around the time that we were in theGreat Recession and there was almost no work for new grads.
(03:29):
Many of my most trusted professors implored me to go to grad school.
They're like, don't go into the market.
It's bad out there.
You're not going to like what you see.
Stay in college for a minute.
But I was ready to go into the real world.
And at the time, I
was looking for growth industries.
I found a early stage bootstrapped SaaS company that was starting in Phoenix, Arizona,where I live.
(03:57):
And I responded to a Craigslist advertisement actually, and joined this company as one ofthe first 10 employees and learned what software was, learned the SaaS business from
scratch.
And I've been in B2B SaaS ever since.
It was one of the luckiest.
most like serendipitous things that's ever happened to me and got the opportunity at thatcompany to touch a bunch of parts of the business that I had no business being involved
(04:26):
in, but that's the nature of a startup.
through those learnings was able to grow my career from there.
I ended up going into marketing and led the marketing team there slowly sort of continuedto find new
B2B SaaS environments to grow my skill set.
It is not traditional for a CMO to transition into a Chief Customer Officer role.
(04:55):
But at Postscript, the reason that makes sense is twofold.
One is our main customer that we sell to is a CMO, is a marketer at our customer accounts.
And so obviously having deep understanding and empathy for
what our customers go through is really important to being able to serve them effectively.
And then two, one step along my career trajectory was I worked at a company calledGainsight, which I think now has exited to Vista as part of the Vista PE portfolio.
(05:26):
But that company was a customer success software company.
I worked there for about five years.
And what we did while I was there was we defined what customer success was as aprofession.
And we were at the very,
tip of the spear there on that movement.
And so while I have never been a CSM myself, I definitely have been living in the CSMworld for a long time.
(05:51):
so, you know, as a result of that, that trajectory I was on when it came time to findleadership for our customer facing org at Postscript, you know, it made a little bit of
sense.
And so a lot of times I talked to other CMOs, they were like,
Tell me about the CCO move.
that your choice or theirs?
I'm like, no, it's actually, it's a great thing.
I still maintain leadership of the marketing org and I've added the customer org to it.
(06:16):
And there's actually a lot of really cool, unexpected synergistic benefits to being amarketer and servicing software that sells to marketers that makes it all make sense.
And so it's been a crazy journey and becoming CCO at Postscript kind of feels like the endof like a full circle moment.
for me.
No, that's awesome.
(06:37):
That's awesome.
I love the full circle moment.
Well, let's talk a little bit about Postscript.
what is the scope of the business?
What do you guys do?
Postscript is a revenue platform that's focused on SMS for the Shopify ecosystem.
So the TLDR is we use messaging tools to make Shopify merchants much more money throughsales.
(07:02):
And so the business is about six years old now.
We have over 300 employees.
We have over 20,000 customers on the Shopify.
platform using Postscript to communicate with their customers.
And it's been a crazy journey.
It's been lots and lots of fun.
(07:22):
think Postscript had started as kind of a product-led sort of anyone can use it, installfrom the app store, an upgrade type of business.
And over time, we've added lots of enterprise features to serve the enterprise in Shopifyas well.
And we have customers that are people just getting started selling their first goods onShopify, as well as the, you know, nine and 10 figure brands that sell on Shopify as well,
(07:52):
like Brooklyn in thrive, cosmetics, hex, clad, et cetera.
True classic teas.
The list goes on.
And so it's been a really crazy journey and lots of fun and have learned a ton over thelast four years that I've, that I've been a post script.
Awesome.
Well, you know, we've been hearing about, I think for some time now, this idea ofconversational commerce.
(08:18):
And it seems like with the combination of messaging and commerce platforms like Shopify,you guys are at the epicenter of this.
But tell me a little bit about how you think about conversational commerce and what shouldwe be thinking about?
Yeah, conversational commerce is a funny thing.
seems obvious to people that it's worth pursuing.
(08:41):
That's why it's been a hot topic for over a decade at this point.
It's above my pay grade to understand why all of the other attempts at conversationalcommerce haven't worked.
I think people often wonder, why don't we have a super app like they have in other partsof the world?
Or why aren't most transactions in the United States being done on mobile?
(09:01):
And cash doesn't even exist in some other.
other parts of the world.
And there's, think, a bunch of reasons for that to just get down to the way that Americansshop and, and our behavior online.
But we have not had like the product market fit of like the right software with the rightchannel to facilitate conversational commerce experience that makes sense and actually
(09:28):
reduces the friction associated with shopping and makes it more enjoyable.
for the person to shop.
when I joined Postscript, part of my thesis outside of the fact that I loved the customersand the people who were working on the problem is it just really felt like two megatrends
(09:49):
were intersecting and they're not going to stop intersecting.
One being more transactions are going to be done online over time, digital commercegrowing.
All you have to do is look at Shopify's stock chart to know that's true.
And then,
messaging as a major component of the way that people spend their time online, especiallyon their mobile device, messaging in a bunch of forms, but especially text messaging
(10:15):
dominates the time that people are using their mobile phones.
so Postscript exists at the intersection of both of those things.
And when I think about conversational commerce, people have tried it with apps, but thoseare really hard to get people to download and keep on their phone.
People have tried it like native to the platforms, but all of the social networks, peopleare there to engage with their friends or be entertained and shopping is kind of
(10:40):
tangential to that.
So it's always kind of felt like, know, round pegs, square hole type of situation.
And we really think that SMS is a kind of a dark horse channel in this environment, mostlybecause it has one thing that makes it incredibly special that people tend to
(11:00):
underestimate.
which is SMS is the only channel that exists for marketers that is fundamentally two wayfrom the get go.
you send, you look at a marketer's emails, right?
They send them from a no reply at email address.
you know, when you're doing an ad, you're not trying to get people to engage with the adnecessarily.
(11:23):
Although, you know, that helps add performance, but you're trying to drive them to a siteto have a singular sort of journey based experience.
And SMS is automatically two way from the jump.
And that surface area we think is why it's best suited to nail the conversational part ofconversational commerce.
(11:44):
And we're really excited to experiment with that, especially as it relates to whatcapabilities are being unlocked as a result of generative AI, which I know we'll talk
about at some point in this conference.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, this notion of SMS is naturally two way.
That totally makes sense.
(12:04):
What should marketers be thinking about that we're not thinking about or maybemisconceptions with SMS?
Yeah, the biggest one is I think marketers always struggle with this.
They always have struggled with assuming that their customers are going to behave the waythat they personally will behave.
(12:25):
And as a result of that, a lot of people, especially folks who haven't started trying totext message their customers, they assume that it's going to be incredibly intrusive.
The customers will be annoyed.
There's no way.
a good customer experience could come from this channel because that's where I text withmy significant other, my family, et cetera.
(12:48):
So I don't want brands to be in there.
The idea of like annoying my audience is a really big deal.
It's a big impediment to a lot of marketers exploring the channel.
And that's just not what we see at all.
Right.
Text for marketing use cases is not that way.
You can only text people if they double opt in to receiving your messages.
(13:13):
And so from the, from the beginning, any single person that you're going to do an SMScampaign to
has agreed to get that message.
There's nobody who should be getting a message that they didn't opt into.
And if you are messaging people that way, then you should come talk to us because whateveryour provider's allowing you to do might put you in hot water.
(13:33):
It's not allowed on the carrier pipes.
So first off, the entire ecosystem should be 100 % double opt-in.
Two, when we look at unsubscribed rates globally,
they're incredibly low because of that.
It's just like any other marketing channel.
If you're adding lots of value to people who agreed to get your marketing, guess what?
(13:56):
They like it.
that's worth pursuing for most brands is finding out what that means for you.
And it's not the same for every single brand.
But when you nail that, the voice, the value add, and the consent, then what you end upwith is a very highly engaged
high earning channel.
(14:18):
And a lot of people are finding that they're actually making more money off of a SMS listthat ends up being only one fifth of the size as the email list that they've been
cultivating over the last few years because of the integration with the phone, theimmediacy of the channel and the engagement that you're able to generate via the messaging
(14:38):
inbox as opposed to the email inbox.
And so I just think people assume
that nobody wants to text,
And what we see is that people not only like to get texts, they stay subscribed for a verylong time.
They buy a lot from brands that are texting them and shockingly, they will text you back.
And I think a lot of brands are really, really surprised to see their customers engageback over the text channel.
(15:04):
But that's probably the best signal you can get that it's a highly engaged audience whowants to deepen their relationship with your brand, which ultimately as a marketer, always
trying to find ways to get the relationship to be more connected.
And I can't think of a better way than learning how to be engaged in your most, yourcustomer's most intimate channel, which is in their text inbox.
(15:27):
Yeah, no, that's I really like the fact that like the notion of they'll text you back.
mean, to your point earlier, you were making like you got to get the voice right.
You got to use the channel in the appropriate way.
I think as marketers, I think we really need to make sure that we step back from all ofour other channels because this channel is unique in that regard.
(15:48):
Right.
Like how do you text your friends?
You know, I text my friends very conversational, shorthand back and forth.
It's not the traditional email that we might be used to.
conversational opportunity is completely untapped in, especially in North America.
(16:09):
Some of the data that we see, which surprises folks is that, but in some ways it's kind ofobvious when you think about what would it take for someone to jump over the hurdle of
texting a brand.
But what we see across our data, which we send billions of texts a year, so we have agreat global data set.
(16:30):
is that people who text a brand back buy four times as much from that brand than someonewho does not.
And so hurtling, finding out how to create enough value over this channel to get someoneto engage in a conversational relationship with your company is worth it, not just from a
customer experience point of view, but actually it affects the top line and bottom lineresults of your business.
(16:55):
And so we talk to our customers about that all the time that
Cracking the code on conversational for your brand is not just makes you feel good.
It's a financial imperative.
I love it.
All the big martech providers out there, they're pushing to add more channels.
Those include SMS in some cases.
As you think about best of breed versus consolidation of providers, how do you think aboutit?
(17:22):
What are you seeing in the marketplace?
Yeah, there's a couple dynamics here.
First, at Postscript, we only do SMS.
We've been focused on SMS only from the get-go.
And that is not a common, at least today, a common approach to being a MarTech vendor.
But there's some really good reasons for why we do that.
(17:44):
One is that we just believe that focus is going to drive innovation on the channel.
and we don't believe that email and SMS are the same thing.
And so I think those two core ideas have been baked into the values of the company.
(18:05):
The results that we see are that we generate significantly better results, not onlybecause of our technology, but also because of the strategy that our team is able to put
into the channel in partnership with our customers.
So it's not just about
the tech, although we do believe via our focus, we've developed the most innovativetechnology portfolio.
(18:28):
But, you know, as marketers on any channel know, if you put bad marketing into a highlyeffective channel, it's going, it's not going to automatically be incredibly effective.
So the strategic advice that we're able to offer to get brands to actually maximize what'shappening on a two way channel that's mobile first, which is totally unique.
(18:50):
allows us to unlock a ton of incremental results.
The other thing that I think people overlook when it comes to SMS is SMS is technically ausage based and it's a metered usage type of product.
And what I mean by that is every time you send a text, you have to pay.
There are fees associated with the carriers.
(19:11):
There are fees associated with the telecom infrastructure.
And so I think when people think of email, for example, as like a free channel wherethey're like, well,
If my numbers are down, we'll just send another email blast and it won't cost us anythingexcept my team's time.
When you send an incremental SMS, it does cost money.
And the result of that, which I think is really interesting is a lot of people have alarger SMS bill than they do an email bill.
(19:40):
And when you consolidate with a vendor and you have, you know, your one or two hours ofstrategy calls with them a month.
and they're spending 90, 95 % of their time talking to you about email performance whenactually the spend that's going into the channel is significantly weighted towards SMS and
you're getting, you know, what five minutes a month of advice on how to make this channel,you know, really saying, I think the merchants that are maximizing their total cost of
(20:10):
ownership, maximizing their ROI and the dollars that they're putting on all theirincremental channels.
are finding specialists to be able to deliver those results.
That's really where we kind of hang our hat on is via our focus on the technology and ourfocus on the strategy, we'll make an SMS dollar go a lot farther on Postscript than you
will on a kind of, you know, jack of all trades, master of none type platform.
(20:33):
And the other thing I'll add to that is the tools that we all use to integrate ourtechnology together.
are battle tested.
They've been around for a very, very long time.
And I think the integrations, as long as they're built effectively, are super robust.
They're two way, they're real time.
They don't leave almost nothing that is left to be desired from a orchestration point ofview.
(20:59):
You know, the entire software industry has been, you know, deeply integrated, especiallyin B2B software for many, many years now.
And so the gap between
Does this channel live inside of the platform or is this channel simply integrated intothe platform?
That gap today is incredibly narrow.
And I would say that it doesn't leave anything to be desired from a orchestration point ofview.
(21:23):
And so you kind of get the best of both worlds with, you know, our focused approach versusconsolidation.
Look, you've been in tech for a long time.
So have I.
We all know these are cycles, unbundling and bundling.
That's all the money's made.
He
I, it's obvious that we've been in a consolidation cycle for the last couple of years assoftware markets have been kind of more difficult and folks have been, you know, pressured
(21:46):
to reduce their overall spend on tools.
That's fine.
I expect that, you know, as the, the winds kind of change, consumer sentiment seems to bestrong and stabilizing that we'll see a, an unbundling cycle, especially as
AI unlocks all sorts of new capabilities on a bunch of tools.
(22:07):
think people, yeah, they want efficiency, they want savings, but I think what people wantmore than anything is growth.
And growth comes from innovative strategies, innovative technology, and those innovativestrategies and innovative technologies are more likely to exist on best of breed tools out
(22:28):
there.
And that's why we developed the strategy.
We've
developed and what I expect to see in the software market over the next few years.
Awesome.
Well, you mentioned AI earlier.
You just mentioned it again.
Let's talk a little bit about AI and how it's working its way into use cases for SMS.
(22:48):
What are you seeing?
Yeah, so there's there's two sides to it.
What we're developing is, guess I took a step back.
The thing that's really important to Postscript is to develop technology and innovationthat actually drives dollars for our customers.
We don't want to just do innovation for innovation sake.
(23:10):
That can be cool and shiny new object, but ultimately our customers are entrepreneurs.
They're building.
the next great set of brands, American brands.
And, you know, we want to make sure that we're always driving their results up and to theright.
And so that drives everything that we do.
How do we make people more money?
We've developed AI in two areas.
(23:31):
One is we rolled out a tool set that we call infinity testing.
basically changes the standard structure of an A B test and instead allows you to testhundreds of variations of messages against your control.
proven by a holdout test so that you can see the incrementality of what AI is doing.
(23:52):
And that scale allows marketers to, one, do something that they've never been able to dobefore, which is run statistically significant tests in the background using thousands of
variations, as opposed to doing a slow and cumbersome standard A-B test to unlock newresults and learnings about their campaigns and automations.
(24:13):
And our goal there is to increase earnings per message for our customers proven in the theholdout.
And the results have been amazing.
We have an automation's product in the campaigns product as well.
But ultimately, once that's set up and you're running it in the background, we're drivingupwards of 35 percent lift on earnings per message on Postscript.
(24:36):
So literally, if you take a campaign that you're going to run and you run it on
some SMS platforms pipes versus putting it on Postgres pipes and activating our AIproduct.
Our AI product will earn you 35 % more earnings from that same campaign than it willanywhere else.
And that's not as a result of our pipes are faster or our team is smarter.
(24:59):
This is actually the AI is going to find variants that are going to drive meaningful liftand those compound over time.
And so that's less of a...
conversational use case.
It's more of a generative to testing use case, but we find that to be really valuablebecause marketers are spending all of their time trying to run experiments to find new
(25:21):
insights.
And that process can be very slow and also result in lots of tests that are eitherinconclusive or don't show any lift.
And so this is a way to find lift quickly and scale the lift quickly.
And so that's the testing products that we've
developed for AI.
And SMS makes that easy because the medium is simply a short text message.
(25:47):
there was a full email or a full website or landing page or something like that, thosethings can be done, but they're a lot more complicated, especially to do on the fly.
And you probably have way more brand controls that you want to put into place.
But with texting, we can do this quickly.
We can verify that it's on brand in a much more narrow surface area.
(26:08):
And that allows us to move a lot faster.
other direction that we're building in with AI, which I think is kind of obvious and we'resuper, super excited about is the conversational aspects, the being able to help people
shop and help people handle their challenges while they're shopping.
Some of that can be as a result of them having questions.
(26:31):
Some of it can be as a result of them not being able to decide between two items.
There's educational components, et cetera.
But ultimately, if the AI is on brand and it understands the SKUs and it can understandthe voice and needs of your customers, then providing a conversational experience over
(26:51):
text to aid in the digital shopping experience is incredibly exciting for us.
The way we think about it is when you go to the mall or a store and you think of a veryconsultative in-store shopping experience.
The question would be how, what is the, what is the best version of that for onlineshopping that really hasn't been delivered.
(27:16):
You know, I've had some really great in-store shopping experiences, especially for veryconsultative things like, know, if you think about you go in and are looking for like new
golf clubs, it's like you're engaging with a sales associate on a, on a whole range of,uh, of, of variants.
that are personal, that they need to understand about you to be able to make a goodrecommendation.
(27:38):
And the tool sets that are available to do that online are pretty rigid comparatively.
And a conversational interface that understands your customers and your brand, I think,could go very far in not only helping to create a good customer experience, but drive
meaningful conversion.
And so Postscript is very focused on how to bring conversational into the center.
(28:03):
of the digital shopping experience.
There's some very cool things coming out later this year that'll make that easy andscalable for most of Postscript's customer base.
So we're really excited.
I think the conversational part of AI is, you can see it all over the place.
mean, there was a conversational AI company that ran a Super Bowl ad this year.
(28:25):
conversational being applied to all of these different use cases is obviously a growtharea.
Our goal is to develop the most on-brand, most effective conversational AI possible forSMS and e-commerce use cases.
And that's what we're really focused on delivering this year.
Awesome.
Well, I mean, it was super interesting to hear you talk about AI and the testing use caseas well.
(28:48):
I mean, that's a unique use case.
AI is uniquely situated to help solve, but I don't hear a lot of people actually using itfor that purpose.
So thanks for highlighting that, too.
I the conversation will make sense.
So I was tracking that.
understand that as well.
But I hadn't heard that one before.
(29:08):
That's pretty cool.
The testing use case is like a stepping stone to eventually getting to that one-to-onemarketing world that everyone wants, right?
Every marketer in the world, everyone who's listening to this, we all know that getting aperfect message to an individual person is the holy grail.
That's what we all want to do.
(29:29):
It's really difficult to make it there to find the exact highest performing message forevery single person.
And our infinity testing product is is one step in that direction, which is find thethemes that create better performance.
And we're going to continue down that path to find the themes, words, topics that createbetter performance.
(29:52):
And we'll continue to narrow it down on an individual basis.
The goal being eventually we can automatically craft a high performing text message forevery single person automatically inside of PostScript.
And so.
That's where we're going with it.
And we think that the infinity testing product set that we rolled out is a very meaningfulstep in getting to that real one-to-one marketing world that we all know is worth going
(30:18):
towards.
Awesome.
Well, one of the things I like to do on the show is get to know you a little bit better.
my favorite question to ask everybody that comes on the show is, has there been anexperience of your past that makes up who you are today?
Yeah.
When I think about an experience that has really defined who I am, this is probably acommon one, but when I was a kid, I moved a lot.
(30:44):
Both of my parents worked in the federal government, and if you know anything about thefederal government, if you want to get promoted, you typically have to move, and you're
moving all over the country, and eventually you get to DC, and then you move away from DC.
That's just the way it works.
And my family was no different.
And so I moved a lot when I was a kid and especially at some very formative points in mylife.
(31:10):
And so very quickly when I was young, I had to learn how to, you know, adapt and handlewhat I would consider to be, you know, a challenging situation.
Every time it happened, it was just a completely new environment where I had to kind offigure out where I fit in and what I wanted, what I wanted to be, who I wanted to be.
(31:31):
And those experiences, I think, were really formative.
some of the things that I think are really important to me from a values point of view inwork and in personal life about being open, adaptable, being curious, I found that to be
something that's really important to me.
(31:52):
And I think that that was kind of honed when I was being put into these environments whereit was a whole new set of variables every single time.
understand my surroundings, use not just IQ but EQ to figure out how to navigate in theworld.
And those experiences, I think, gave me a lot of tools that I use today, not just at work,but definitely in my personal relationships and how I experience life.
(32:23):
so, yeah, think moving a bunch when I was a kid,
really had a big effect on me.
There's no good times to move when you're a kid, especially if you're building a life.
But the one that was the craziest was my parents moved us to Arizona where I live nowright when I was in my junior year of high school, right about to be a senior.
(32:48):
That one was particularly challenging at that time.
That was just one of many.
But I think
like most things in life, you can, you know, you have some agency and how you perceivesome of those challenges.
it going to, are you going to take it as a, you know, a hundred percent of negative oryou're going to find a way to turn it into, you know, a positive sort of experience.
(33:11):
And that one was no different.
And, you know, it's just been, it's been a, been a journey.
And I, while those scenarios were not easy in the moment, I,
definitely wouldn't go back and change anything about him.
Well, thanks for sharing.
mean, those definitely those moves, especially as a teenager can be exceptionally toughwith social circles, etc.
(33:36):
So I appreciate you sharing.
If you were if you're starting this career trajectory all over again, is there any adviceyou give your younger self?
Yes, definitely.
When I was starting my career, I was very self-conscious about what I didn't know.
(33:57):
think in general, people would call that imposter syndrome.
That's a common thing people deal with.
Even when you move up in your career and have a bunch of experience, you get in with adifferent level of folks who have different backgrounds, different pedigrees.
can easily
easily doubt yourself.
And one of the things that I would tell my younger self that I learned along the way thatI found to be really helpful is just the idea that you're like telling yourself a story
(34:26):
about what's going on or what people particularly think about you.
But the truth is that nobody's thinking about you at all.
They're way too busy thinking about themselves.
so this idea that you're being judged or scrutinized all of the time, or I bet
somebody saw me make this little mistake and they're wondering if I'm the right person forthe job as a result of that.
(34:51):
That's all just in your head.
And the truth is that no one thinks about you at all.
that I found when I eventually got to the point where I realized that was true, that feltreally freeing to me.
It felt like, if no one's really thinking about me all the time and analyzing what I'mdoing the way I'm analyzing it to myself, then.
(35:11):
that gives me the freedom to try to make an impact that will resonate or will create sortof the attention that I want.
So yeah, if I could go back in time, I would tell young Mike, hey, don't worry about thepeople talking about you.
They're not talking about you at all.
(35:33):
Don't worry about it.
love it.
I feel like that's a good lesson for marketers too.
Like no one's talking about our brands, right?
Like very few of our brands are they really talking about.
So yeah, we gotta get, we gotta own our message, get it out there.
Well, is there a topic you think marketers need to be learning more about or maybe it'ssomething you're trying to learn more about yourself right now?
(35:55):
Yeah, I think there's a level of like statistics in analytics that I definitely didn't seeuntil I was in e-commerce.
So before I was at Postscript, which sells to e-commerce marketers, I've just been ingeneral enterprise, B2B SaaS environments mostly.
And there's so much of a focus on attribution and analytics and media buying and in e-commthat's kind of what makes the industry go around.
(36:24):
When I started getting into e-commerce, I realized there was a level of understanding ofeffectiveness of these channels from a marketing point of view that in my prior companies,
we just weren't at that level of maturity.
And as I started to dig into it more, I realized that a lot of the folks who are leadingin analytics or incrementality or now what's coming down,
(36:52):
into that world is causal AI.
So AI paired with some of these, you know, hardcore statistical models to create modelsfor marketing effectiveness.
You know, the people who are running those companies now are like full on scientists.
And so I think that, you know, the world is going towards AI handling a lot more of thatfor us.
(37:18):
But I think the interpretation of those results
and being able to understand what you're looking at is going to be, as it scales up insophistication, it's going to be really difficult for marketers, I think, to understand
what really the AI is telling them in this new world.
And so I think I could have paid a lot more attention to my stats class in college.
(37:42):
I'm sure everyone probably could have.
But what I'm seeing on the bleeding edge of
attribution, incrementality, AI, where that world's going for marketing use cases.
It's pretty scientific.
It's pretty sophisticated.
And I think everyone in marketing to prepare for that could do a little bit of a brush upon how to think about their, know, dust off their old statistics textbooks and get
(38:07):
reacquainted with that world.
Because I think a new level of sophistication and measurement is coming to marketing asit's being enabled by AI.
And so that's something that's like on my mind and I'm seeing a lot of the bleeding edgestuff affecting the e-commerce world right now, not only with companies, but also just
(38:27):
with people who are at our customers who are incredibly sophisticated with the way thatthey think about measurement.
Yeah, no, I agree.
think that's really good advice.
Folks that work with me know I geek out.
used to manage market research for companies.
yeah, it's I believe everyone needs to have some base level understanding of stats and howto apply them, how to interpret them, etc.
(38:50):
I think, yeah, I totally agree with you.
It's a great, great suggestion.
As you think about like any trends or subcultures that you follow, you think other peopleshould take notice of anything come to mind?
Trend wise, one of the things I'm paying attention to is I think in general, there's amove towards analog IRL sort of experiences and goods.
(39:15):
Like we've been in this digital wave for a long time now.
And I think what I see is, you you can see it in a bunch of different areas.
There's like a renewed interest in, you know, in aesthetics that show up in like
you know, clothing and interior design, there's a renewed interest in more analog things.
(39:37):
You could see it like car design, right?
It's like people are doing more like retro styled cars that people want like lesstechnology and more of an experience.
You can see it in like events and experiences are, you know, the reaction to everythingbeing digital a few years ago is very much like get out in the world in person.
(39:57):
You can see it in people's like music consumption, like vinyl is the number one growingmedium for listening to music.
so I, in general, I think I'm just paying attention to the way that culture reacts to the,you know, prevailing, you know, media methods at any given time.
(40:21):
And I think we're at a point now where everyone's been
living in a technology enabled sort of digital world for enough time now that I thinkwe'll start to see a lot more the other end of the cycle, which is how can I get more
offline?
How can I get more analog experiences?
How can I connect with things that are less digital?
(40:44):
And I see that as a, know, it's not an emerging trend, it's been a trend, but I see itcontinuing.
to drive really interesting opportunities for marketers and definitely a different sort oflike consumption style for, you know, the younger consumers that are influencing more and
more of our culture and ecosystem.
And so that's definitely something that I'm paying close attention to.
(41:07):
Last question for you, what do you think is the largest opportunity or threat facingmarketers today?
Yeah, I think the it'd be impossible to answer this question without talking about AI inthis particular moment.
But I do not think that marketers are in in danger of losing their jobs or theirprofessions.
I really subscribe to the idea that like, AI is not going to take your job somebody who'sreally good at AI is going to take your job.
(41:33):
And so I think the biggest threat to marketers is
full on throwing out the baby with the bathwater and rejecting what's coming with AI.
think there's lots of creative ways to use it.
I think the off the shelf tools are not good enough.
And I think the marketers that'll really end up succeeding in this new world are figuringout how to take the off the shelf tools and build something with AI that will uniquely
(42:01):
help their companies do whatever job they're trying to do.
And that's going to require you to be as a marketer, like an AI first thinker andunderstand what capabilities you have in your tool chest to be able to deliver a good
marketing outcome.
So the, the big threat would be, can't, you can't put your head in the sand.
This is coming.
(42:21):
There's no way around it.
The question is just how you respond.
And I think that if you're open and excited to experiment with what's out there, you'llfind that there's tons of ways.
where what's coming with AI, what's here with AI today can make you a more effective, morecreative marketer as opposed to responding in fear and being worried about it, removing
(42:47):
the profession entirely.
don't think that's ever going to happen.
I would say this is a moment to really, really lean in.
Well, that notion of human plus machine, think is the right notion.
Mike, thanks for coming on the show.
Congratulations again, and I wish you luck in the coming weeks as you prepare for that newedition.
(43:11):
Yeah, super excited and I appreciate you bringing me on the show.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent theviews, thoughts, and opinions of Deloitte.
The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only anddoes not imply endorsement or opposition to any specific company, product, or service.
(43:38):
Hi, it's Alan again.
Marketing Beyond is a Deloitte digital podcast.
It's created and produced by me with post-production support from Sam Robertson.
If you're new to Marketing Beyond, please feel free to write us a review and subscribe onyour favorite listening platform.
I also invite you to explore the other Deloitte digital podcast at deloittedigital.comslash podcast and share the show with your friends and colleagues.
(44:04):
I love hearing from listeners.
marketingbeyond at deloitte.com.
You'll also find complete show notes and links to what we discussed in the episode today,and you can search our archives.
I'm Alan Hart, and this is Marketing Beyond.
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