Hello and welcome back to the Retail podcast live from NRF.
This time Rob Gough from Salesforce General Manager of
Retail. Have I?
Got that right you got there. Honestly, you're doing.
Great. Really beads of swing coming
down my hands. I actually saw Rob dazzling the
audience about your new capabilities.
And so for those who don't know, let's take a step back for it.
Let's talk about you for like the first bit and then let's
talk about Salesforce in terms of thing.
So just tell us a little bit about you, how you got here,
your journey through Salesforce, how long have you been at
Salesforce? Yeah.
So again, Rob Garf, GM for retail here at Salesforce.
I've been here a total of 13 years.
That's actually been a combination of coming in through
the acquisition of Demandware, which is now Commerce Cloud.
And I am now, like I said, oversee retail and consumer
goods on the product side. So we're building products and
solutions to bring them to market.
The intent is recognising that consumers traverse nine
different touch points in any given shopping journey.
We're trying to create a unified platform to really personalise
and remove that friction across all of those touch points.
Yeah, I mean, when I was at your Chicago event, I was blown away
how you are embedding AI into like every single module as you
go. And so you're responsible for
that. Yeah, Mark, in terms of bringing
that to market for retail and it sounds like you're at
Connections, it's always that happens in the fall and spring,
excuse me. And yeah, you know, it's
interesting. Everybody's coming at AI from a
different angle. At Salesforce, of course, we put
data in the middle. We put trust in the middle.
But most importantly, what I'm hearing from our retail
customers is they don't want another user interface to do
their job. Our research at Salesforce has
shown that store associates on average have to log into 12
different systems on a daily basis.
That's just untenable. That really doesn't allow for
more productivity or customer and consumer engagement.
So we make AI right in the flow of work.
So for us marketing across service and commerce.
Wow. OK.
So so I I guess the whole the outcomes that you're creating
for retailers, you're allowing them to get to things a lot.
I mean, customisation, for example, is one of the outcomes
you focus on. Yeah.
I mean, if you think about the outcome, and I like how you're
framing that up, is ultimately removing the friction, right,
between inspiration and purchase through a frictionless and
personalised experience across all of those different channels,
both in store and online. And with AI, we're doing that by
embedding it right in the flow of work.
Yeah. And what I think is also super,
super interesting is that I talked to a lot of customers
about a, I mean hundreds of customers since the about 12
months at Generative AI came on to the map.
And some are talking about low end or I should say bottom line
improvement for efficiency and productivity.
Yeah, others are talking about top line growth.
But the one thing in common is the customer and the customer
experience. And also, by the way, I'm often
corrected, it's also about the employee.
Yeah, it's very ants ultimately thinking about what problems
we're solving on their behalf and not trying to create these
big shiny objects, but rather solve practical problems for
either the customer or the employee.
OK. There's a couple of areas that I
want to go in Yeti, for example, or massive Yep Ban.
It's incredible how many talks I've been at where they've used
Yeti as the store of the future. Yeah.
In terms of blending all of these experiences, yes,
Salesforce at the heart of Yeti, that's right.
In terms of the e-commerce transformation, yeah, you just
take for those who don't know about Yeti and what you're
doing, can you just tell us about you know the outcomes
there? Yeah, absolutely.
I mean you know them through tumblers and you're seeing them
through the different coolers they have really innovating and
disrupting the market yet he is one of my favourite brands,
personally one of the older demand.
We're now Commerce Cloud customers, so holds a very near
and dear place in my heart. And yeah, what they're looking
at when they went from just going wholesale through the
brick and mortar retail locations direct to consumer,
they came to Salesforce and they said how do we better understand
who our consumer is. Yeah, so we start to connect the
dots in terms of their profile, their preferences, their
shopping behaviour, what service queries they have, how loyal
they are. Yeah, they help personalise that
experience. And it's not like you go out
every week like in a grocery store to buy a new Tumblr, but
rather they need to think about how do we proactively trigger
something to inspire the consumer to buy something you.
Yeah. And in order to do that, they
are creating a 360° view of that consumer in activating it.
Yeah. Through marketing.
Yep. Through commerce.
Yeah. And through service.
So again, that consumer is having a consistent experience.
They're being treated and served as they should as a loyal
customer. It it does feel that that's the
blueprint of the future if I'm honest.
From listening to all the talks about how yetis creating
physical, incorporating digital and then backing them off to
each other, right? So the website refers to the
store, store refers to the website and you and you've got
this thing. Final thoughts.
Yeah, I obviously AI massive theme.
Yeah. What I'm really curious of the
number one thing customers, you must have met so many customers,
what's top of mind for them? What's the one thing they
they're being asking you about? Well, The thing is, I'm really
encouraged about the positive mindset.
I mean, NRF here, there's so much energy.
We feel like we're back and even above where we were before the
pandemic. And retail executives, I'm
talking about are focused on growth.
They're focused on increasing the share of wallet.
Yeah. And that might be beyond the
categories of the products or the services they have provided
in the past. That's why you're hearing about
retail media. That's why you're hearing about
retail health, retail logistics and even more thinking about,
again, beyond the kind of constraints they've been in the
past. And the way they're going to do
that is better understand the consumer and monetize loyal
shoppers to find new and different ways to serve them
better. And the way ultimately that
comes down to we talk about AI. Yeah, right.
How many times have you heard AI this week?
It's not. Inside, I just climbed 1000.
It's, it's an AI revolution. But it's as much of A data
revolution. It's a skills revolution, it's
an organisational revolution, it's a trust revolution.
And most importantly, it's a customer experience revolution.
And so you wrap all that together and it's really a
transformation that I have never experienced in my time in
retail. It's fundamentally going to
change the way we're interacting with our consumers.
Yeah. Our suppliers, our employees and
ultimately driving loyalty and growing really sustainable
relationships. I I love that.
Can I ask one more question please?
OK. Salesforce, you have so many
different components. Yeah so many different products,
so many different entities. I a lot of the community may not
be or the the effects may not be on the Salesforce journey.
Sure, if I'm thinking about this world and I'm either re
platforming, I understand what I've built doesn't work.
Where do I start? It's the one thing where if I'm
turning up to talk to Salesforce, how do I get the
maximum value? What?
Where do I start? Yeah, it's a great question.
It's a question that I get, I guess if I frame this up a
little bit, retailers are engaging with consumers like I
said across nine different touch points in any given shopping
journey. Consumer electronics have
probably on the higher end, if you're a fast moving consumer
goods like convenience store, you're at the lower end of that.
But my point is consumers are traversing online and offline to
ultimately buy what they want to get the service they need.
And so what's happening though and the retailer side, retailers
according to our research that Salesforce have to manage 44
different systems could actually manage that engagement.
That doesn't even account for the back office.
That's just consumer engagement. Yeah, you can't do that
efficiently. You can't do that effectively.
Yeah. So you think about, you think
about Salesforce of course at the highest level we are the
number one AR, we are the number one AI CRM, period, full stop.
What does that mean for retail? We infuse data.
We infuse AI across the entire buying journey across all of
those touch points, marketing, service, commerce.
We layer on Tableau for analytics.
You have Mulesoft to integrate all those disparate systems and
Slack to bring productivity and collaboration to the hands of
the frontline and headquarter workers.
That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much.
We can carry on. I know they're queuing up to
take you away, so I really appreciate.
Absolutely. My pleasure.
Thank you very much. Have a good day.