[Music] [Frank Biggerstaff] So it's an honor and privilege to be here. I'm going to kick us off.
I'm first time presenting, that Katie and I are tag teaming. We have a unique relationship. A little bit about me, I am new to Marriott. I celebrated my one-year anniversary yesterday. Whoop-whoop! Thank you. Thank you. But not new to Marriott's marketing orchestration, marketing operations. I've been involved for 10 plus years, various capacities. Way back when we stood up Adobe Campaign, remember what version it was in 2015 or 2016. So I'm your marketing ops or marketing stack guy, and I just recently inherited the Workfront practice and Workfront COE. So super excited. This stuff is neat to me. I've been involved from the beginning in the metadata standpoint in the back-end of the database. Now I'm learning the front-end and the power that can be accomplished with Workfront. So I think we touched on this. Let me talk about our ways of working with my fabulous and lovely partner in crime, Katie Calver. So Katie's superpower, anybody knows her, is she is an innovator. What's a new term we learned today? CIA from the Coke guy, chief innovation agitator. Katie is an agitator in its highest form. In its highest form. Katie and I've worked together for 10 plus years. But one of the things that Katie does is she pushes, she always wants us to be testing. What's your-- [Katie Calver] ABT. - ABT. - Always be testing. - Always be testing. So I simply try to keep up in most cases but what I have to do is make sure I tag along behind and make sure that we can apply a scalable ops model to, what do I usually call it? - Your [CURSING] ideas. - Yes. We're going to keep this PG-13. We've got two swear words, okay? It's only two. Only two. We figured it was 04:30 so it was okay to have swear words in our presentation. Katie's going to give her bonafides in a second but we'll do a couple house keeping things. So people in the audience that know me raise your hand. People in the audience that are surprised that I own a sports jacket raise your hand. - Awesome. - Everybody raised. Everybody raised their hand. So we want to keep this interactive. I know it's late, it's 4 o'clock, Wednesday Bash night. So anytime that I say the word Workfront, I'm going to say work, you're going to say front. So let's practice. I say work, you say-- [Audience] Front. - Awesome. - That was good! That was awesome. Katie may sprinkle it in, but it's more in my presentations.
And whether the thing in the essence of time, we've got some of the typical questions that we asked ourselves as we cycle through some of the core components. They're probably going to be rhetorical at first, so but no fear. If you want answers, see me after class. We'll answer them, but we're going to make sure we stay under the 60 minutes because we both struggle with brevity. Most of you can attest to that. And I accidentally forgot to start the timer, so. No. It was my job. Oh, but you didn't do it.
- We're doing great. - Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm Katie Calver. I've been with Marriott for about 12 years now, and I've been focused in roles around integrated strategy and activation for pretty much that whole time across all of our channels. As Frank said, I'm a pioneer, or at least that's what Deloitte tells me. And I like to challenge our status quo by asking questions like, why and what if and can we, can we do that tomorrow, Frank? Tomorrow-- Is one of my favorites. And our mission really is to create impactful capabilities for our marketers while also creating game-changing experiences for our members and guests.
When we think about what is needed to deliver those experiences, we have to recognize that Marriott has evolved significantly over the past century. What started as a hotel company or if you're really going to test me, a root beer stand has grown into a global organization with a vision to connect people through the power of travel. Today, we proudly represent 30 brands, driving revenue for 17 diverse products, including those 10,000 hotels, credit cards, homes and villas, tours and activities, and experiences across 70 markets worldwide. As our footprint has expanded, so has our need to market it effectively.
Our team is dedicated to innovating personalized and orchestrated experiences across six channels. That's a little conservative. It's really owned channels for us, but you take paid into account. It's much larger. In 24 languages, and we're constantly being asked to grow and do more. We support over 3,000 stakeholders from properties all the way up to our HQ teams and we help them drive more than 350, which I also think is conservative. It depends on how you define a campaign, which we'll get into with campaign metadata each year. It's a dynamic and exciting challenge for us, and we're committed to making every connection count.
Make sure I can use all my tools here. Awesome. We're going to get into marketing orchestration. So let me read you the Apple AI definition of marketing orchestration and how it translates to what we do. So if you're not an Apple person, sorry. Marketing orchestration is one strategic approach to coordinating activities across multiple channels, all while ensuring personalized customer experiences while improving its efficiencies. But to us, marketing orchestration is much more than just moving content into the market. It's the lens by which we gauge how effective we are in our workflow automation. Our goal is to enhance the customer and the associate experience. We want our marketers to have it easy as anyone else.
And you're going to hear me reinforce this using metadata to be efficient and cost-effective. Metadata is the key. I love metadata. I love it. How do we do this? Through seamless data integration, through technical optimization, team synchronization, and refined marketing activity optimizations. First joke, that's a lot of zations. You guys are a rough crowd at 4 o'clock.
We got a couple left. Yeah, so tying this part off you must have alignment with key stakeholders because you can imagine through Marriott we have a lot of fingers in the proverbial marketing pie. All right, so you got to get alignment there.
By bringing these elements together we create a more connected impactful and efficient marketing system that drives better outcomes for both our customers and our business.
So one of the key questions we had to ask ourselves as we were going down this journey or jumping on this train is, are we going to be centralized or decentralized? You can read from the slide, centralized, decentralized or hybrid. We are a combination, we are both. The reality is Marriott operates at a hybrid approach level. We're not fully centralized. No, we're not fully decentralized. This isn't by accident, it's by design. For global organization like Marriott, hybrid approach is not an option, it's the only option.
We govern from the center and we make sure that we are pushing out-- We let our local regions have flexibility while we govern from the center and maintain inputs and outputs. This is an ongoing process in evolution that we roll out new features and then we make the decision do we keep it in the center, do we push it out to get flexibility to our region.
So we had to take a hard look at how we went to market, especially as we aim to support this hybrid interaction model Frank just hit on between our HQ centers and our regional teams. And let's be honest, marketing at any big matrixed organization is already challenging enough. But when you add in the need to market our efforts and make them less like one-size-fits-all billboard, batch and blast campaigns, and more like personal conversations where we're considering regional nuance and audience segmentation and content and message variations, it gets even trickier. So about 18 months ago, we embarked on an exciting journey with our partners at Block + Tackle to evaluate our marketing practices, or candidly lack thereof, and identify opportunities across people, process, and technology to make our marketers' paths to activation less full of friction. We started with the end in mind, defining what success looked like from the outset, which is something-- I don't know if you experienced this, but I hadn't seen a lot of in projects I've worked on in the past. By setting those clear success metrics, we could measure our impact along the way. And the journey has provided us with a lot of key learnings that are helping us transform our marketing operations for the better.
Our first big learning after our discovery was that Marriott had actually never documented our end-to-end, we're sharing a lot of state secrets here, go to market process across channels. So when we looked at that process, and you can see it real tiny in the bottom right there, when you blow that up, it is complicated and over engineered. And we realized that it was very complex but also we had never really scrutinized it before. Rather, over time, years in our case, we just added to it as new people or new technologies came on board instead of continuously evaluating it for improvements. As we dug in, we found that we actually had, and I think Hilary hit on it this morning, about 45 mini processes.
And they were all semi-related, kind of not. They all felt like their own little special snowflakes, and most operated on their own islands. And we saw that sometimes they conflicted, sometimes the activities were ignored altogether, some had arbitrary dependencies that prevented them from even starting. And only pieces of it were actually documented. And there was a false assumption that the process runs linearly. As we talked with our stakeholders and thought about what our process should look like, we found that it flows much more like on the right. It's living and dynamic, functioning more like interconnected components that relate to each other but are not necessarily dependent upon each other. We then drilled in to each component to understand the activities and the key inputs and outputs that are needed at each section, and we spent time understanding the handoffs, which are really important. This exercise resulted in the definition of our North Star optimized process that we have calculated will result in about 75% improvement in our speed to market.
As we considered the value our work would bring to the organization and where to focus our efforts to drive the most impact for Marriott and our marketers, we anchored our work in two key measurable categories. After all, enhancements that don't improve our process aren't really enhancements at all, so it was important to us to measure them. The first category emphasizes the importance of data as our foundation. In case you didn't get it from Hilary earlier, we are data geeks. We love it, which means we like the details that data give us. But to get those details, we need to ensure its quality, its accuracy, its completeness, as well as establish a single source of truth and meaning. All of this helps us achieve our goal of data-driven decision-making and optimization for our marketing efforts. The second category spotlights our need for efficiency in how we go to market. I'm not sure how it works in your organization, but if you're like us, getting something into market can be unnecessarily hard. We are really good at overcomplicating things, and I think we heard that as a theme also in our Keynotes this morning. We have too many manual steps, too many documents, too many handoffs, which introduce friction, risk for error, and, ultimately, a lot of extended timelines into the process. To accelerate our speed to market, we needed to address those activities and make significant changes.
But first, we had to figure out where to start. I mean, where do you start when everything needs to be addressed? Everything is a hot spot across the process, and no one is really happy. We settled on three areas that emphasized foundational improvements. We looked at not the most glamorous things, but definitely the most important things. The first area focuses on the standardization of our campaign details, followed by the automation of manual process via a workflow management solution. Work-- Front. You're still with me, Nisha. Stay awake. Let's go. Nisha, I think that's my only one. And finally, the importance of centralizing where we collect campaign information, ensuring our teams have what they need to start their work. And we'll cover these three in more detail in the upcoming slides.
Over the next few minutes, we'll talk through these areas, and we thought it would be a good idea with our dynamic duo partnership over here to tag team between the business problem we're trying to solve for those marketers who, like me, may know enough to be tech dangerous and the way our operations and tech teams choose to solution against it, for those marketers like this guy who love to get in there and understand the how and the mechanics behind it. For this first business problem, our marketers, myself included, really struggle to get a comprehensive view of how our campaigns are performing at the level of granularity where we can derive insights for future activations. We as marketers are really sick of finding out too late that we can't understand performance because we didn't set up the campaign for that level of visibility. And our analytics teams are tired of having to find ways to stitch all that data together to get us a view of performance because there's no standardization and consistency. Our marketers are asking for granular levels of data to help us create more sophisticated marketing efforts, and we needed a solution that can address that need. So we went to Frank for that problem. Asked him to-- And all of our team-- Me and some smarter people, but yeah. So we're back to the theme where I thought or I told you that campaign metadata is key. Metadata is the foundation.
Metadata becomes the signals in which we act our workflow processes. And in the old world, we had different metadata definitions and relied on human intervention for metadata definitions. And a lot of times those naming conventions resulted in varying ways about messaging measurement and talking about the same thing. And this would, as Katie mentioned, would drive our analytics team nuts. No consistency, all the wild wild west, so we address that. So now getting into the What, the Why, and the How. The What is a cross-channel campaign element hierarchy. We call it CEH. Sometimes that confuses its travel very well. Essentially, it's a taxonomy tactic or it's a taxonomy path or a drill path inside a campaign.
The Why, the CEH enables global consistency and global metadata. And the How is by we worked across teams and we created standard metadata definitions.
So getting into now here's some of our rhetorical questions.
Campaign metadata is usually organized in what is called taxonomy. Hilary actually said taxonomy is sexy this morning in the Keynote. I completely agree. So let me see a show of hands if you have taxonomy in your current workflows.
Do you like it? Do you not like it? Is it consistent? Is it hierarchical? Is it what we call network where it's multidimensional? A combination of both. So we obviously recommend multidimensional gives you more layers to drill into.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to address the first question. So how do you know if you have campaign metadata? You can determine that if you have campaign metadata by checking for the structured data associated with your marketing campaigns. Here are a few ways how you can do that. You can check your marketing platforms, check your marketing and analytics tools for campaign attributions and performance metrics. Review your data feeds. If you have campaign data, stored it in a database, data warehouse, or dare I say, spreadsheets, you can check there. Review your data feeds. Sorry. Scroll up. Cool. My partners let me down. Sorry. Examine your tagging strategy. If you use UTM parameters or tagging, those often contain metadata definitions or aspects of the campaign, so you can use that as well. And then finally looking at your report dashboards. If you have dashboards aggregating campaigns performance, metadata is usually used there to filter, segment, provide insights into your campaigns. If you're missing metadata, see me after class and we'll talk through that. I'm really surprised if you guys don't have metadata at least in your business or your workforce. It's more about drilling into it and making sure it's-- And having consistent standard definitions that can be used across multiple channels. Because anytime you enter the human touch, it becomes a wild wild west, and I really-- And you have the analytics folks do not like that at all.
So we just hit on all the data that we need, and we want to standardize it, make it consistent, make it available, but it has to move through our systems, right? And I always say it should move through our systems automagically. And then there's somebody behind that who says it doesn't happen automagically. And I say, "Well, let's try." We're getting there. But we are really manual, and we're not set up to support that. To get marketing out the door, we have a million steps, often managed through touches like email or calls or SharePoint or Word documents. And this approach made it really hard to see how marketing was activated. It wasn't standardized, and it was managed everywhere and nowhere, exacerbating our inefficiencies and creating duplicative information across our ecosystem, sometimes significantly extending our time to market. And to top it off, we often have to work with 10 plus teams repeating our same requests based on their planning cycles, which don't always add up. When we finally documented those steps, we saw that we had many of these processes, and they were actually very similar, not the special snowflakes that they claimed to be. So when we outlined that North Star optimized process I mentioned earlier, which aimed to streamline and simplify our activities, identify and remove those manual steps, and create a centralized place to hold all of this information, rather than storing it in Excel. No offense to Excel, it just has a different purpose.
And also, in email back and forth, also has a different purpose. Marketers don't want to spend the bulk of our time as project managers. We want to be strategists. We want to be ideating and creating innovative campaigns. So once again, I turned to my partner in crime, Frank, and said, "How can we solve this problem?" An agitators.
So you definitely need a centralized tool to optimize and enforce your process.
But if you're going to take anything away from this presentation, if you have a bad process, it will be reinforced inside your workflow automation. So if anything sticks from this, please lead with process first. Right, you must lead with process and because again, if you have a bad process, Work-- Front. Will police that for you free of charge.
So the What is a centralized tool that accommodates workflows or process steps providing visibility to status, pipeline, and any related issues. The Why, it streamlines processes, supports forecasting, and we-- Sorry, with monitoring resourcing needs. The How is we started with activation workflows. We piloted with less complex processes. And again, always remember, process first. Take anything away, process first. Yep.
So this is one of my favorite slides and, again, new to the transformation game, but this walks with me everywhere. We actually needed a roadmap or an artifact we could socialize to everyone to see our plan and how they can progress in workflow automation. We developed this as our guide. We also refer to this as the workflow maturity scale or curve. This artifact guides the process and it guides our partners. This visual follows a structured progression starting with independent work that requires minimal governance, collaboration, automation.
And then it progresses through various stages to complete automation. We're going to briefly drill into each one of these things. Again, this is my favorite artifact that we've built and we take this everywhere with us.
So the first is To-Do List or manage independent task. At this stage, it gets our users in the tool and what I like to say in the southern accent tooling around. - Tooling around. - Tooling around. And provides some light but effective stock features.
Go ahead. The next is Project Templating or collaborate and repeatable work. At this stage, it's our users' first intro or taste of templates and the possibilities of collaboration. Here's where we get them hooked typically. Go ahead. - Bless you. - Bless you.
The next stage is Metadata Augmentation or forms that initiate and facilitate. At this stage, it furthers our users' journeys into collaboration and introduces them into usage and the power, here we go again, metadata capture. Metadata is everything.
Next.
Workflow Automation, logic replaces manual steps. At this stage, this is where our end users maximize the power of collaboration, metadata, and automations. This is where the AI overlords will replace us as marketers. Just kidding. Just kidding. Just kidding. Not my joke, but I'm using it. It's a great one. This is basically where the process takes all the manual [CURSING] our plates. That's number two, we're still PG-13.
This is the highest level of maturity from our perspective. So in closing this out, I often use this for our partners or you are here as you progress through your maturity inside workflow automation or Work-- - Front. - Come on, say it again, Work-- - Front. - Good job, guys. Okay. Yeah. So we use it, you are here, we keep them grounded, keep them prepping for the next stage. Some teams are still very content happy being in a to-do list and having the freedom to do whatever they want. But again, we centralize them with the inputs and outputs at the core. I will tell you there is-- Sorry. There is value in every step.
So yeah. Love, again, that's my favorite slide. So workflow automation in Work-- - Front. - Yes. You guys are getting better. Does this make sense or is it resonating to you? At least our artifact and how we're walking our partners through a slow progression on unfettered, do your to-do list, your checklist, little regulation, little governance, little collaboration to all the way up until full automation or nirvana. But if you have any questions about that, see me after class.
We really want to focus on the automation while automation is key. To me, the definition of automation is where collaboration and data capture and data flow are invisible to our end users. We want that. How many of you people use automations today? Have concept of automations? Like some of it? Like it? Like some of it? Don't like it? If we really are stressing that as part of a value prop for Work-- - Front. - Front. And workflow automation. Okay. How we doing on time? Good. It's like that. We are killing it.
You're hilarious. In addition to our process steps housed everywhere, our marketers also manage the actual marketing development across various platforms, operations teams, and across different time horizons, email and PowerPoint, Word documents, Excel, meetings, and even in our heads. Does that also sound familiar to anybody in the room? We gather our information over time as we build our marketing plan, and we flesh out what is needed for actual activation. But because we're working with so many teams who request information differently, this approach often led to redundant inputs, which would then often be interpreted differently by our recipient teams. They manage the requests with their own manual, often inconsistently applied activities, coming back to us when we would leave fields blank because of where we were in the planning cycle. And somehow, once they finally had what they needed and we stopped making changes because we are guilty of making late stage changes as marketers we get marketing out the door. And I think Hilary hit on the days. It's about 110 on average when we set out and evaluated it. So what we really needed was a place to hold all of the components of our activation from ideation through measurement across all of those teams involved. So from my perspective, brief is a fast follower number two to how important metadata is centralized, right? It contains the metadata needed to describe what is my experience and it connects it with the automations to drive the activation for effective again, metadata capture and analysis determine not only how has my campaigner experience performed, but how have different components performed. That's when you get into the network metadata.
Because we've shifted from a mindset at Marriott, especially in the email channel, we were only focused on clicks and email activity data at that high level. Now we're moving to where we can actually see the efficacy of a content block, which is super cool. You can now see how cost effective that is, that content is successful we can use it all over the place. So that's what the metadata does, that's what the CEH does, that's what's really key to us moving this forward.
Getting into the Whats, Why, and the How, Katie mentioned we came up with a standard campaign brief beginning at the activation process with high level inputs just to get the ball rolling. The brief is a living breathing mechanism, if you will, that gathers inputs throughout the process and it always allows for changes. The Why is because activations and I was feeling this the most. I'm sorry, I was feeling this the most. We're beginning with incomplete information and anybody that has any experience with activating on any channel if you have incomplete requirements or set up it drives you crazy. And it was leading to less than ideal process as you can imagine. We know marketers, no offense Katie, don't have all the data in the beginning, and we gather inputs along the way. So we made it easier for Katie to be continue to change her mind as we go through it. - Yeah. - I'm fickle. Yeah. Fickle. So we created what we're calling the progressive brief in Work-- - Front. - Come on. - Work-- - Front. We need to do about 10 more times because we're so fast. - Yeah. - We don't. You're doing great.
Right.
Yeah. So here's some more questions. Let me see a show of hands. How many of you have briefs as part of your Workfront? Do you have a bunch of briefs? Do you have it consolidated? Some of the things we were asking, should we centralize? Again, see me after class, we'll go through some of these specific questions but we always recommend consider having a unified brief and a lot of times it's easier said than done, right? You're going to have to get input from everyone where you can consolidate it and make it consistent.
So some of the questions I think we've got enough time we'll dig in. Do you use the same brief for multiple campaigns? Or should you? Many teams often reuse the same brief for multiple campaigns either after starting point or after standardization template. But should we? On one hand, using consistent brief ensures alignment and prevents duplicate offers.
On the other hand, each campaign has unique objectives, audiences, and strategies. So while we're using the brief might seem efficient, it can also lead to gaps in customization.
Is it a document captured as metadata? We hope so. Additionally, campaign briefs have been standard documents often in Word, PDFs, or even an email change, that's the worst. However, modern workflows demand more dynamic structures.
Capturing brief details and metadata within a shared tool allows for greater scalability, searchability, and integration with campaign execution platforms. With metadata, we can track versions, automate approvals, and maintain a single source of truth for campaign details.
Where is the brief developed? Understanding where your brief is developed is critical to ensuring efficiency and collaboration.
After drafting briefs and isolated documents or in shared platform, where should you document them? Is there a centralized hub for input from all stakeholders? This is key. Marketing, creative, media, and analytics teams.
A shared tool provides real-time collaboration, streamlined approvals, and a clear version control to avoid confusion and delays and rework.
In conclusion, a shared mechanism for campaign activation workflow can transform how we manage briefs. From static documents to dynamic integrated workflows.
By addressing these key questions, we can ensure that our campaigns are not only consistent, but also agile, adaptable, and data-driven. And we want our marketers to come back to that brief. So often, when it was in a Word document, they would just pass it over the fence, right? And then you would never come back to it. As soon as you did that, it was obsolete, right? Because you started thinking about more things. The Workfront's enabled us to have that dynamic thing that we go back to, we evolve, we build upon, and we learn from, and then it's stored for the future. So if we want to repeat that campaign or we want to take learnings that we have from it, we have a central starting place to do, so. We'll get back to my personal frustration from an activation standpoint is getting incomplete requirements. What the dynamic brief does is it answers the core questions from an activation standpoint, from a content standpoint, from a measurement standpoint. You're not getting that via email being incomplete. Again, I love our marketers to death, but some are better than others. And some of our marketers will pretend they're not very tech savvy or don't know the data, but they really are. And they'll spoon feed the information, but this actually crafts it in a consistent manner that we can use and teach people. So again, I think metadata is number one, but the consolidated brief has been huge.
So we've come a long way from when we pitched this idea, I don't know, what, 22, 18 months ago, that we could change the way Marriott goes to market, even with our existing people and technologies, while we looked at new technology on the horizon. And while some days, I will admit, it does feel very daunting.
We are optimists, right? - Yes. - Okay.
Just double checking. - I'm always optimistic. - You can ask the front row here.
When asked if we could use our tools better, challenge our processes, and improve our marketers' lives so they can focus on really cool and innovative activations to sell Marriott and to delight our guests, we took the leap. As Frank noted, we were all in. We're all in. Now 18 months later, we continuously realize meaningful change and are addressing the real problems that our marketers have faced for years. I should know, and as a former campaign manager, that's how I cut my teeth at Marriott. I know where all the skeletons are buried, which is why I guess I'm a little tech dangerous. But we're now supporting those marketers, myself included, at the level of sophistication I'm looking to do and the answer, the hypothesis I'm looking to test. And here's how. Everyone talks about having so much data. We've been capturing it for years, but it's really hard to actually use it when it's not organized or in some cases, you literally can't find it. We've made everything we touch data. I said we're data geeks, right? So seriously, our mantra is everything is data, and we've structured it to support not only our campaign level performance analysis, but our operational measurement for our products and platforms so we can improve them, as well as to drive and control our process in Workfront. Second, we've ended the way we work. We just literally lifted the table and threw it over. Not lifted and shifted. I hate that word. Oh, no. No lifting and shifting. Just threw over the table. Brand new ways of working. It's very good. And we've done that by manually removing processes and understanding what marketers actually need. We're giving teams whole new ways of working and thinking. Hilary hit a one example with pilot scale BAU. Some people don't like to be in pilot. It makes them really uncomfortable because you're taking the shackles off, but some people really love it. And some would prefer to be in BAU and like their steps and their tasks, and all of that's great, but we introduced that to help teams understand it. And we're delivering value and encouraging constant collaboration. And we've taken it beyond HQ into our regional teams. Global collaboration isn't always easy or even clearly defined. It's not just working together or translating campaigns or meeting and talking about roadmaps from HQ or roadmaps from the continents. It's about co-creating strategies and capabilities that flex to meet global and regional needs and goals. We're not just building something and handing it off. Instead, we're working together to figure out what we need, how our tools can support it, and where we still need meaningful ideation to define new localized strategies. That collaboration and the conversations are different now. The result makes Marriott a true global marketing powerhouse. Yes. Now I think we've established and hit on that it's not easy. We literally led slides with our problem statements. Not when you have over 43 processes and 310 steps for just two channels. And we've definitely sat in virtual team rooms with 300 plus grumpy marketers asking, "When are we going to be finished?" They don't like their current process, but they also absolutely refuse to let go of the security blanket it creates. So I want to share just a few reflections of what we've learned so that if you take on this journey, you won't have the same blind spots that our entire team has had. Our work is transformative, but it doesn't have to carry the weight that is often tied to mass change, big, multiyear timelines, waterfall project plans, massive budgets and resources. You can find a path to big change that is manageable, measurable, and meaningful, right? Secondly, we found that sometimes we're adding more steps into the process, but more here isn't a bad word. It's not our third curse word. - We found simplicity-- - Yeah. We found simplicity in those steps because we're layering in automation and flexibility. And while it's built for what exists today, everything we've built is modularized to power a programmatic future that can support those one-to-one conversations we all really want to have with our customers but probably aren't quite there yet.
Lastly, and I will emphasize this, and I will talk to anybody who wants to talk about it, change management is critical. That is one of the biggest lessons I learned, and it should be at the forefront of everything you do versus as an afterthought of, "Oh, we got to send out comms to let people know that this change is coming." It should be the first thing you talk about. If you lead with vulnerability and empathy with your teams, and you guide them through the pit of change despair, as we call it in some of our meetings, and you help them see that what they'll have on the other side, you'd be surprised at who becomes your biggest adopter and advocate in the organization. And then just a couple final thoughts we'll leave you with. Most organizations and processes are more complex when you write them down, and you open them up, and you scrutinize or challenge the way you think. You should always plan for the unknowns and the unexpected. You'll find some skeletons and some spiders it's to be expected but you can work through them.
- All right. - What's ahead? What's ahead and in closing? So the journey is not over for us by any means. We still have a lot to do. We have not done this alone. So I want to do a little exercise in closing. If you have jumped on this train with us and you're in the audience, please stand up. You know who you are, stand up. Are they not going to stand up? Give yourself a hand. So it's not just us. It's not just us. We've got a lot of help.
A lot of valued partners, a lot of valued internal executive sponsors that are great.
But a final reminder we have of a lot more work to do, a lot more refinement. We want to come back here next year with a bigger and better story. Just looking at what we have, at least on our roadmap, enabling global visibility, we want to automate more workflows, and we want to integrate workflows. And one of the things that you're going to see as a theme here is that we want to empower our regions, right? Traditionally, we have started everything in HQ and stayed at HQ. One of our global missions from our leaders' leaders is we need to have centralized, controlled flexibility out to our regions and empower them. The hybrid model. - The hybrid model. - Yep. Rather than them waiting on, so just to acclimate everyone, when we say HQ, it's the people in this room out of Bethesda, Maryland, we want to enable our regions to put their own flavor on their marketing, their own content. So that's going to be one of our big focuses and that's why we're talking about that how to model and Work-- Front. Is going to be at the center of that. Going to be at the center of that. So we did great. We talked awful fast.
So thank you. - So thank you. Yes. - For spending the time with us. If you have any questions, we're happy to answer them or to Frank's point, you can see us after class.
Thank you.
[Music]
