 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. Hi, I'm Peter Burris, welcome back to our broadcast from Oracle Modern Customer Experience here at the Manila Bay in Las Vegas. We've had some great, great, great guests thus far, talking about the keynotes, talking about how marketing is evolving, and very importantly, talking about how customer experience is becoming a centerpiece of a lot of what businesses are trying to do with marketing playing a significant role, and with that in mind, we've got a great guest right now. Scott Creighton is the Vice President of Oracle Customer Experience Industry Solutions, welcome to theCUBE, Scott. Thank you, Peter, great to be here. So Scott, I'm going to pitch your heart first time out the door here. And that is, we're seeing a lot of companies go through digital transformation, everybody has their own definition of digital transformation, but there is always an element of how the channel is transforming. But we don't often talk about sales people and sales. Let's talk a little bit about how digital transformation is manifesting itself in sales organizations. Great, Peter, you're dead on, so most of the customers we're working with today are going through some form of digital transformation. And the primary reason for that is to really enhance the overall customer experience. And kind of as we talked about earlier, it started out as kind of a digital marketing transformation thing to get the right offers at the right time to the customers and engage with them in many different channels and devices. But what I think customers are learning, we're helping them with is you have to transform the whole company, and especially the sales organization. So the question is, how does that affect the sales organization? Well, the sales organization now has to be as fast, as easy to work with, and transform the processes and the way they interact with the customer through the different product offerings that are now digitized and pre-packaged. So the sales person now has to be much more of what I call a strategic advisor today, and to leverage the different promotions and things that are going on in marketing and be aware of those to be able to offer that same interaction with the customer. So it's a big change. So I used to describe marketing, an old style of marketing is what I called offer, respond, fulfill. We're marketing, we get together, figure out what the offers were, they put them out there, they see who responded, and then they turn to somebody to fulfill them. And in this digital world where we can get more information from the customer, and we can get greater visibility into their requirements, that we're moving to a need, match, engage model. Where we're listening to the customer and gathering what the needs are, and then matching them so that we can engage more effectively in partnership. The sales person still has a crucial role in that matching process, right? Yes, absolutely, and you're exactly right. So now when the sales rep gets that lead, that lead is a very rich lead today. You know what products they're looking at, you know what channels they've been involved in, they know what promotions they're looking for. So the customer doesn't want to start the conversation with what do you need, tell me about your business. Well they want to start it with, I've already been evaluating different offers from different companies, you know that now, and what you basically start the conversation with. I saw you looking at this really cool widget we just offered you. Let me tell you how companies like you in your industry have leveraged and benefited from that. So the conversation is very, very different, and then what price point, what promotions, and match that to the customer, and then now we have a much more rich conversation with that customer experience. But we're not going to have sales people to become themselves data analysts. No. Presumably the software and the solutions are going to have to present different options. Absolutely. How are the solutions going to, what types of technologies, new ways of doing things will be necessary so that the sales person can be presented with the right set of options so they can match with the customer? Exactly, so we've announced some new innovations here. One is around adaptive intelligence. So now rather than the sales rep having to think in their mind and really understand different price points and products and the configurations, as they're talking to the customer or they see that original lead come in and they start that conversation, adaptive intelligence is going to be able to give them, here's what the best offer is. Here's a recommended step. Here's recommended customers that are like theirs that they could benefit from this product. So the sales rep is way more effective now as a trusted advisor versus being an administrator and trying to mix and match and look at all the internal systems to figure out what to offer them. So based on what that customer has been looking at and customers like them, what's the next best offer? What are additional add-ons and packages that get served up to the sales rep in the conversation with the customer in the process flow to have a much more effective sales effort with that customer? So it sounds like the sales person is actually part of the process of configuring the solution and not just hand-holding and walking that customer from expert to expert to expert where the sales person is really almost a passive participant but just making the introduction. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. So they're in the process. They look like a trusted advisor and on top of that, they don't have to keep all this stuff in their head or look at spreadsheets or product catalogs and stuff. The system is serving up the best products available for that customer based on what their needs are. On top of that now, we've also introduced some significant mobile enhancements with virtual assistant and those types of things that the customer, that the sales rep now can say, what's the latest promotion? And it'll come back and serve up the latest promotion rather than going through sending emails and phone calls and calling different people trying to figure out what it is in process. So when they're having that conversation with the customer through the latest mobile technologies of virtual assistants and leveraging voice recognition, the world for the sales reps completely changed now. And as you're interacting with the customer, the best products, virtual assistant, all these different type of technologies are coming together all on a mobile device so we can sit out on an iPad like this and have a very robust conversation but real time meeting your needs in this great customer experience that we're having with the latest products, with the right price. And the best part about all that is, is when you go to hit the order button, now we've got the perfect order for the customer as opposed to a lot of times they're somewhat disappointed, it wasn't quite right, the pricing wasn't right and now we have a perfect order, the customer gets a perfect delivery of the right product and they're very satisfied. So in an era in which everybody's concerned about automation taking away jobs and a lot of folks and commentators saying that, oh yeah, this is, digital's going to replace salespeople. Your suggestion of salespeople are going to get more valuable and be made more effective by digital, you're going to augment the sales person's ability to serve the customer, you're not going to replace it. Have I got that right? No, I actually believe that what every salesperson wants to be is a trusted advisor and unfortunately in today's world, it's very manual in effort, right? There's a lot of data entry, they're looking at sales forecasts but everything's on spreadsheets still in terms of pricing and product catalog. All that becomes automated now, it allows me to be more effective with the customer and rather taking quotes two days, three days a week, I'm quoting real time because the system's serving up the best products at the best price, now I can be a trusted advisor. I believe every sales rep wants to be a trusted advisor and now this frees them up to do that while the system's serving up the next best step in the sales cycle, the next recommended product, the recommended price, the bundling, we're automating the quoting and the discount approval processes, those things usually take days, weeks, some cases months on very complex orders, today we're doing that real time in front of the customer. So I can be more effective, I can meet more customers faster and I can be a true trusted advisor. So give me your view, five years from now, actually let's make it easier, two years from now, three years, let's say three years from now. How is a sales person going to be spending their time differently as a consequence of the support that these enabling technologies can provide? Sure, so real quick, how do they spend their time today, right? The way they spend their time today is typically on an iPad or a laptop, logging in, sifting through leads, taking a look at the lead information, cold calling customers, trying to determine whether it's a qualified lead or not and walking through a very manual sales opportunity process. Meanwhile, they're going to a different system or spreadsheets to put the quote together and all those systems are usually separate. Let's envision those all on the same platform today such as Oracle Sales Cloud where we have quoting systems, we have the sales processes, we have the analytic tools for sales managers to see better forecasting, now we have adaptive intelligence, we're using virtual assistants, so literally those processes we just described could be on a smart device such as the iPhone, right? And I can do all that speaking through the phone saying I'm with Peter, he's very interested in widget number three, we have a special promotion for that, what's the best price for him? How fast can I get it to him? Okay, produce the quote, approve the quote, submit the quote, now it's in order and we just did that in three minutes or less. So it used to be, for example, now talking about a sales manager, the sales manager used to talk about their A-list salespeople who were the ones that were willing to go into the system, willing to take a look at the leads, good at discerning which ones were good or bad, good at having that first cold call and turning it into something of value. Now, we're not so much talking about A versus B salespeople, if the system is in fact handling a lot of that, making that more of a level playing field, the A versus B salesperson is, are you able to help solve the customer's problem faster by using all this content? I got that right? Because now we can have 100 people serving up through adaptive intelligence, the right product, the next recommended step in the sales stage, what's the recommended collateral and things we need to get to the customer? Everyone gets that same technology, so we're all operating evenly there. Now it's, what is your skills in being a trusted advisor, building that relationship? What's the long-term relationship? And spending time there, knowing everything else is going to be available to you and it's a long-term relationship that you're going to be able to build, so you're separating sales reps not based on how do they do the, do they know the workarounds within your company to get something done, which is a big problem because now you need to be a 10 or 15 year veteran and then the new people have a hard time because they don't know the workarounds and you have to get a quote approved or get a contract on. This is all available now on the platform, real-time, adaptive intelligence through mobile technology, virtual assistant and everyone has access to that technology, everyone's trained on that technology and now it's, your A-people are strategic advisors. So as we think out over the course of the next couple of years and the evolution of some of these digital technologies, the emerging role of the sales person or how the sales person's going to do things differently, tie it back to the relationship between sales and marketing. We're here at the modern customer experience show. What is it that the marketing folks are going to bring back to the sales people to get them excited about some of these changes because it's not just marketing, it's got to be the whole engagement team working together. Yeah, you're exactly right. So what we're getting from marketing now on the Oracle CX platform is very intelligent, very rich leads now. They're scored, they're ranked, they're very targeted and now as a sales rep when I get that lean, think of the days of old, we've all been there, you'd get an email and maybe a phone number. Today I'm getting a full digital footprint. Where is that customer in them? What have they looked at? What have other customers like them based on their geography, based on their industry would be a propensity to buy what? So when I get from today from marketing, the digital footprint of where have they been, where they've been looking at and what they've been looking at but I'm also going to get recommended product offers right then and there. So I can start the conversation saying, Peter, I saw you were on the website, you were looking at this product, guess what? We've got a promotion for it. Do you have any questions about it? Yes, yes, no, here's a couple really cool things. By the way, we have our promotion today. If we add this to it, would that satisfy your needs? Can we go ahead and place this order for you? But it takes a village to be successful with some of these complex products. So how is Oracle, or is Oracle actually also then putting a particular individual within a community that's buying some things in a B2B setting, for example? Is Oracle also helping to pinpoint that person's role within the broader community, within the buying company? Is that something that we're starting to see and bought in? Absolutely, absolutely. So we're using a lot of different capabilities within digital marketing to look at the LinkedIn profiles, to take a look at the social, to look at the different devices that they're on. So I know where, what company's in, what our relationship is with that company. LinkedIn's a new integration that we've announced here. So I can use social capabilities to understand who the buyer is. What is his relationship within the company? Where have we sold in other parts of the company? And all that information. Who they were. Who they were, exactly. And then how do I pull that community together to be able to really narrow in on this one deal and sell this deal? Because you talked about the 15-year-old vet who now knows their way inside my company, but it used to be also that that 15-year-old vet was so valued because they knew their way around inside the other company. And now technology's helping us identify how to navigate the complex buying environment a little bit more. You're exactly right. I could be a brand new sales rep. And then now when I get this digital footprint, I'm also getting the hierarchy of the company. Who this person is within that hierarchy and where have we sold within that company and who those people are. So now I've already know what that company relationship is and I may have never even walked in the halls of that company before. Right, so now I can have a very intelligent interaction. It says, Peter, I saw you looking at his product. Guess what? Your business unit in Japan and so and so in Japan has already bought that product. He's given us a five out of five star rating. Did you know that? No, I didn't know that. Okay, great, here's his name. Let me introduce you to someone else within your company. And your company. Exactly, and that's how it works. Scott Creighton, great conversations. Scott Creighton VP of Oracle Customer Experience Industry Solutions. Thank you very much for joining us in theCUBE today and we'll be back momentarily with more great interviews from the Oracle Modern Customer Experience Show here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.