 I like that. Was that again? Thumbs up? I even had a little scream. I like that. We've got an awesome topic, OK? And I'm going to be presenting some collective wisdom from not just my personal experience, but things that I've learned from some of the best in the business. And for those that are trying to tackle digital experience, I'm going to give you some of the best practices that I've observed and others have collected over years of trying to do this. I'm also going to shoot straight with you. Like, I'm not going to pretend that I have all the answers. No one really does. So I'm going to try to differentiate between some of the hype and the reality. So does that sound like a good idea? OK. So the topic is three-dimensional chess, a game plan for digital experience success. My name is Scott DeLay. I've been fortunate enough to be in the digital marketing and technology space for about 20 years in different roles. Most recently, I was EVP of marketing for phase two. And prior to that, I've been in leadership roles and agencies, one my own and another one I was president of a top 50 US digital agency. So I've seen a lot of really great projects for companies like PepsiCo and ADP and Prudential and Intuit. And I've seen a lot of award-winning campaigns and I've also seen some epic failures. Because despite what people might let you think, I mean, things do go wrong sometimes, especially when it comes to technology. So here's some broad overarching trends that we've all seen. One is that marketing is increasingly responsible for IT-related projects. Secondly, Gartner has stated, whether you believe it or not, that marketing actually has a larger IT budget than the CIO. And they predicted that was going to happen by 2017 and they reaffirmed it, that yes, it did happen. A couple of asterisks. And this, I do believe to be true, is that MarTech now accounts for about a third of marketing budgets. That's pretty significant. Now, what that means to those of us in the room that are marketers, and by the way, who considers themselves in the marketing department? OK, just about everybody. How many of you would also consider yourself a technologist? Wow, just about everybody. So would it be safe to say that you kind of think of yourself as a MarTech professional? Just about everybody in that? OK, just almost everybody. I consider myself the same. I'm not, I know a lot about marketing and business. I know a little bit less about technology. But what's really important is how you put the two of them together. In a world where today marketing has a large IT budget and many of our projects are dependent upon IT success, it really means that we've got to step up our games when it comes to technology, because this is what we're faced with. So this is from the Standish Group. They publish this report every year. And this number hasn't changed much. 71% of tech projects fail. And some of them, almost a third, fail epically. In other words, they never use what they built. And we've heard of some of these, whether it was government websites or a project that IBM worked on for the state of Pennsylvania, $130 million project that just went right down the tubes and never got launched. These things happen. I mean, it's part of life, but this is a pretty scary figure. Because if you're in marketing and you're trying to really make an impact on your business, you can't accept this number. It's not going to fly. And when you're trying to get extra budget to create an amazing digital experience or a digital experience platform, you can't go to the CFO and say, hey, we've got about a 29% chance we're going to succeed. What do you say? It doesn't fly that way. So what I want to try to do is ascertain and highlight what are the best practices to help to make yourself part of that 29%? So I'm going to share with you three critical components of digital experience success, some must-haves and best practices. And at the end, we're actually going to take about 10 or 15 minutes to do a self-evaluation. I think this is really important. You get a lot of content at events like this, but I want to take a moment to actually say, where do you rank? Do a self-evaluation. Try to determine what are the things I need to do, the top two or three things I need to do when I leave here. And I want us to at least go through that exercise together and then share some of that information with one another. So it's a self-evaluation. It's a safe space. So if you don't like your score, it's OK. You don't have to share it. But I do encourage you to at least go through the evaluation and then we'll share a couple best practices. Sound like a plan? OK. So first of all, what is digital experience? We hear a lot about it. It's really sandwiched for me in between, and it's a subset of customer experience. And customer experience is generally defined as a holistic summation of every experience a customer has with a particular brand or product and basically what their general impression is of it. And sometimes that's expressed as a net promoter score. That's one of the most frequent ways of measuring it. But it's really, how do you feel? And are you going to recommend that company or that brand across every touch point on every channel? And increasingly, in order to support that and digital experience as a subset of that, you build out a digital experience platform. So there's a lot of talk about DXPs. And I would suggest that a DXP is more aspirational today, where really I would say is there isn't one company that can give you a DXP. In most cases, your DXP can be 20, 30 different disparate technologies that are going to connect in some way. It's not going to be one company providing all those technologies. There is no such thing as one company that can give you all of this today. And you're going to be at a different stage of maturity on how far along you are with building out your DXP. But I think it's important that at the very least, we do have Martek stacks. So you do have a collection of technologies that helps to serve a great digital experience, that serves a great customer experience. So whatever that is, you need to know what that is and where you're going with it. And we'll talk about that a little bit more. I would suggest, though, that because companies have to transform and they're trying to transform more digitally, that when you're engaged with a customer experience project, you're actually helping a company to digitally transform. And that's a bit of the paradigm that I'd suggest that we need to take out of this, is that we're not just putting in a technology to help with digital experience. We're not just helping with digital experience. We're helping a customer experience. And it's really part of the digital transformation of the companies that we're working with. And that's why sometimes it feels difficult to be doing what we're doing. I mean, sometimes it feels like you're on a cruise ship and you're with a paddle trying to move that thing. And that's partially because you're trying to digitally transform the company. But one of my themes of this conversation and one of the things that I think that we need as an industry to pay more attention to is that don't get hung up on the technology or all these different acronyms. At the end of the day, what customers want is they don't want to be treated as a number. They want to be treated as an individual. They want it to be an authentic, transparent experience. And it also suggests that for you to implement a program like this, it has to be human. And that's why at the end of the day, it's not about digital experience. To be successful at digital experience in your organization or to your customer, it has to be a human experience. So customer experience would really be human experience, and your successful implementation has to be done with a human touch. It's about really the people, not the technology. If you talk to anybody that's been through implementations like this, you could have the worst technology but great people, and somehow you get it done. You could have the best technology, but the worst people, and it fails miserably. So at the end of the day, it comes down to the people. Leadership and not management. If you woke up today and you think you're a manager, you're not, you need to be thinking like a leader if you want a project like this to succeed. And lastly, it's not just a project, it's a transformation. This is probably part of a multi-year effort for your company to change and for you to change the way that you market and interact with your customers. So here's the three critical components. And as I just stated, not all of them are equally important. It's the typical people process technology, but instead of people, it's really the team that you build. I'll talk about process and talk about technology. So team-wise, these are the five key people. I saw the last presentation, there was that picture of the table, the round table, with the globe in the middle. I think that's beautiful. I think that's really a great representation of the number of people that need to be involved in a project like this and the stakeholders. But here's five key ones that I'd say you've got to get right. First is the customer, and I'll tell you how to do that. Second is a great tech leader yourself and how you show up, an executive sponsor, and partners. So a couple must-haves when it comes to your customer and evidence that you understand what's happening with your customer. One is personas, and the second is customer journeys. Customer journeys really are the backbone of your digital experience or your human experience program. So here's how many people have personas right now of their customers. OK, probably about 90%. They look something like this, and it's a little hard to see. But this is Linda, for example, and Linda is pregnant with her first child. So we have a narrative about her and what she's looking for. A couple of things on the bottom that I think are important are what is the initial trigger? Like what started this reason that she might need to find us, in this case as a health care provider? And she found out she was pregnant. That's critical for you to know. As a marketer, you need to understand what that's all that point in time. You also need to know her emotions and how she's feeling at that point in time. Some of the other attributes here are the devices she uses and definitely the media that she looks towards. But it's really more of the human aspects of it, the motive aspects that are going to connect most with her. And you take that, and you translate it into a customer journey, and it might look something like this, where you have the stages, the life cycle of Linda's journey to find an OBGYN. So awareness through to engagement. On the left side, you have, for those stages, is it a positive, a neutral, or a negative experience. So when she's ready to look, she might go to a search engine. And it mentions on the bottom some risk and opportunity. So she doesn't have a lot of time, and she's nervous about finding a new doctor. Now, if you're providing content at that stage, you've got to be sensitive to that. And you're going to be way more effective if you provide content that is. So in this case, short form. In this case, a search engine ad. Something quick to the point, sensitive, with the right tone from a content perspective. So you follow the journey, and you see where you've got opportunities. And I think there could be 20 different touch points here. There aren't, in this case, at least in this diagram. But you prioritize those touch points based upon the ones you have the greatest opportunity to delight or disappoint. So take all the touch points, prioritize them. The 80-20 rule will apply. There'll be 20% of those touch points that will either disappoint or delight, and you'll either own them or you'll lose them. So don't get lost in the 16 of those 20 that don't make the biggest impact. Now, let's talk about you. I think a lot of times in a conference like this, we talk about the technology, and we talk about process. I want to talk about you, the human aspect of this project. And I think we all have to ask ourselves every day, and are we leading or re-managing? And I can honestly say, some days I'm waking up, and I'm kind of managing. There's other days that I'm truly leading. And whatever role you play on your team, you want to be waking up every day and leading. Whether you actually have your own team or not, you are part of a team. And even if you have your own team and you have a project like this, you're probably a matrix team. So you have to be thinking about, how do I do team building? How do I build up this team so they're working together and they're not feeling like they're in silos? And last part of this is take care of yourself. I mean, your team's going to feed off the way you show up. So how are you showing up every day? Are you unorganized? Are you frazzled? Are you reactive? Are you honest and authentic and human? Are you letting people know, hey, it's going to be a tough path the next two weeks? This sprint's going to be rough. Or you know, you're blowing smoke. Like how you show up, how you take care of yourself, this will translate through your entire team. And of all the stakeholders or the five key people, I don't know if there's anybody more important than yourself and some of these characteristics. So taking care of yourself can also mean, I think some best practices are journaling. I love the five minute journal. I don't know if anybody uses that. I think it's great. Of course, meditation with the Headspace app or Com, eat, write, exercise, all the basics. But the team's going to feed off of you, so make sure you're taking care of yourself. Other key stakeholders or team members, your tech leader. So you may be an expert in tech, but you need somebody that sleeps, eats, and breathes. You need to be able to go to this individual, they need to have an opinion on your tech roadmap. Are you going to go headless? Are you going to go decoupled? If we're going to have 27 technologies talking to each other, you might not know which ones you need to talk to each other yet, but what's our point of view on this? Like are we going open source or are we not? Why or why not? Like this person needs to have a point of view and it needs to be not just about the technology, but how it directly relates to the project's success. How is this going to make us be more agile? Or how are we going to serve our customers better, create a more human experience? They have to be able to translate that for you and you need to be able to count on them. They need to show up. So if you have a gap here, you need to fill this. An executive sponsor. These are just one of the projects. You have to have somebody that is not just watching your back, but looking ahead to other departments because you're probably going to be interacting with other departments. And so you need that executive sponsor. You need to be totally aligned with that individual. And most likely your goals are not going to just be, did this project get done on time and at the right cost? It's going to be, did it improve our net promoter score? Did it improve retention and acquisition and loyalty? Those are the type of metrics that you should have involved with this project. And when you do, your executive sponsor has to be at the table with you and walking side by side. And then partners. Most of you are here, I'm sure, because you've selected Drupal. And DXP doesn't stand for Drupal Experience Platform. It's a digital experience platform. There's going to be a lot of other technologies that you're going to need to hook into this. So you're buying into an ecosystem and it's really helpful to select partners that work together. So like when you walk through the trade show floor or you're deciding on technologies or you're deciding on agencies, see who works together already. Because I can tell you from real life experience, like they have a real vested interest in making you successful. They will go above and beyond. They will, you'll get things done faster, less expensively, and ultimately a better solution if they already work together. Even if they don't have the integration done yet, they're going to have to integrate. You want them to have a vested interest in doing that. So you can save yourself a lot of time and money by finding the right partners. Now on to process. So this is number two. Goes without saying, but you have to have a project plan. Now people have project plans, but they don't update them. So if you haven't updated in the last two weeks, you don't really have a project plan. You have an old document, you're not living it. So make sure that it's an updated project plan. Another critical part of process is continue with your team building. That has to be something on your mind. What am I doing to make this team more cohesive, more productive, more enrolled, more fulfilled? One of the things that I've seen recently is, you see people do personality tests. So we have the Myers-Briggs or others. And I think that's a really good exercise for a team is to understand like, where's everybody coming from? What makes them different? I think that tells you what their how is and how they act. It doesn't necessarily tell you what their why is. There's a company actually located here in Seattle called Imperative. And they do an assessment to try to understand what people's purposes are, what their whys are, and what their narrative is around that. You share that with your team and then you do team counseling or team coaching. And I find that to be a really interesting and effective way of team building. So you might want to check that out. And don't forget to recognize. Does anybody follow Gary Vee? Gary Vaynerchuk? Couple people? I mean, he's great. He's blowing up LinkedIn right now. You can't go on LinkedIn without getting a million of his videos. And he'll just randomly call one of his teammates and just be like, hey, thank you for everything that you're doing. Like just that random recognition goes a long way. So make sure that you're acting like a leader and you're providing that recognition formally and informally. Aligned business goals. So over 2,000 people were asked what makes digital transformation effort to fail? And one of the number one reasons was a lack of communication and a lack of alignment on business goals. So your entire team should understand what the goals of this project are. Whether it's a net promoter score or a lifetime value. If you're using the EOS methodology, a great book by Gino Wickman called Traction. It's a great methodology for managing companies and teams. You might call it a rock or OKRs are very popular these days. But make sure you've identified the goals. Your executive stakeholder can help. Make sure your entire team knows and those goals are known across and down the organization. And give regular reporting. So as part of your updated project plan, talk about how you're doing relative to the goals. So if you've implemented certain aspects of this platform, how are you doing? Is our net promoter score going up, going down? Your team needs to be thinking about that. Not just whether they successfully completed the next sprint. And don't forget your executive sponsor meetings. These are easy to get canceled. Don't do it. You should be speaking with the sponsor every couple weeks. You will need them. So make sure it's on your calendar and that you get to that meeting. And you're not just talking about the latest Game of Thrones episode. That's important, but also talk about how is this project doing relative to the goals that you've set. Make sense? OK. Lastly, technology. Because actually it's not as important as the other components. I'm going to show you a great way to take a look at your information architecture. Select open technologies in a tech map, road map rather. This is an exercise that Acquia goes through that I think is just fantastic. And the feedback that I've heard from people implementing programs like this is that they have to know what they currently have. And this is a great way to go about doing it. So it's basically an IA of a Mar-Tech stack. And you would take your logos and you just plot them to what your current state is. What people will tell you is that when they do this exercise, there are black holes all over this. There are areas that they have no idea what technologies are being used. And then the next thing is it's like who owns that technology? Like who makes the decision on that technology? It's the next really important question. So this is enlightening. And this will take you some time. But you have to have this done. You have to have to do it. You will have people come up to you and be like, wow, I had no idea we had that technology. I had no idea we didn't have that technology. And you'll have gaps on who actually owns it. And you'll have to go find out who owns it. And you'll find that people are actually having to make decisions that they do own it or don't own it. Without this, it's going to be very difficult to navigate the matrix organizations that you're probably in. This is a beautiful way of looking at it. So when you get really advanced at this, you're done with your DXPIA. And you could submit it for a stackie. This is one by Paychex. Paychex is actually a Drupal customer. So they use Drupal. And they submit it. And they won for the stackie awards. I won't go into detail on this, but you can find this on chiefmartech.com. Once you start getting advanced and you have your customer journeys and you have all these disparate technologies, you're going to want to orchestrate those customer journeys and analyze how customers are going through those journeys in a cross-channel fashion. And there's some really great new technologies out there, such as Acquia's Journey product. There's others out there as well. And it allows you in real time to plot the customer journey and see where customers are falling along that workflow, and then do A-B testing along the way. So a really great advanced technology. Still in the early stages, it will be a standard set of your Martech stackie in the future if it's not already. Open technologies, there's going to be 27 technologies you might integrate. You need them to be open. You can't have these walled gardens with proprietary technologies that either don't have APIs or you can't get at the data. You have to be able to get into the data. So make sure that your technology advisor is vetting those technologies to make sure they're open. And just because something is open source, by the way, does not mean that it's an open technology, that you can readily share information. So you'd have to look at that separately. And a technology roadmap. This is going to be a multi-year process. So let people know what the horizon looks like and what the stages are. Even if you don't know the technologies that you're going to use yet, it's helpful for them to know like, oh, you're planning on putting a dam in place in 18 months. OK, that's great. I know that the dam's coming in 18 months. Or I know that the CDP, customer data platform, we're not thinking about that for two years. OK, cool. I get it. So having a plan and giving visibility to your team is something that's really helpful. OK, self-evaluation time. Ready to rock? Wow, come on. Are you ready to go? Let's do it. So if you have, you're going to have to keep score. So I'm going to give you some of these points. You're going to give yourself points, and then we're just going to compare the numbers that we come up with. So first is your team. And that's 50% is 100 points total. That's 50% of the overall numbers that you can, the score that you can get. So give yourself 10 points. If you're leading, you're always leading versus managing. You give yourself five points. You're kind of 50-50 somewhere in between. If you have your primary customer personas and journey maps completed, give yourself 10 points. You have a strong tech lead, 10. Not so strong, maybe a five. Give yourself the number of points that you want in there. Have you identified your key partners that are going to help you with this effort, whether technology partners or agencies? And do you have an executive sponsor identified and on board with this effort? OK, we'll add those up. Everyone have theirs added up. So how many people got like 25 points or less? And be as honest as you can. How many people 25 to 35? And how many folks 35 to 50? OK, so most are in the middle. So a C score on this category is a 27. Just a benchmark where you are. OK, next. Keep that score handy because we're going to add these all up. Process. Do you have an updated project plan? That means that it's been updated in the last two weeks. Yes or no? Five points or zero? Regular team building. Are you thinking about that? For example, one of my former colleagues, Nicole Linde, she, to keep healthy and build team, did a Fitbit challenge. And she created a group where they would count their steps and compete for prizes. And that worked out really well. There's other opportunities for you to go do MSK's cycle for survival and do that as a team. So volunteer opportunities are a great way. Doesn't just have to be happy hours. You can be healthy and have fun and build team. So regular team building activities. Do you have aligned business goals? Give yourself 10 points. And do you meet with your executive sponsor at least every two weeks? All right, add those up. How many people? 10 or less points. OK? How many folks from 10 to 20? Most people in there. How many folks 20 or higher? OK. Great. Last one, technology. If you have an updated DXP information architecture or a Martek IA, give yourself five points. You've chosen to open technologies. It's going to be important. Give yourself 10. And then do you have a technology roadmap? Meaning just, do you see the technology is going to be rolling out at least for the next year? And I'd recommend you want to start looking towards two years to three years out as well. OK, up to 10. 10 points or less. 10 to 20. And 21 to 25. So it sounds like on this piece that more people were less than 10, actually, the bulk. So we have a little bit of work to do on that part of it. Questions on this? I'll stop for a moment while we. So I'm going to leave you with this thought and that this session was all about how to create a great digital experience, but hopefully in some way I've impressed upon you that it's really not about the digital experience. We are here to serve human beings. They want to be treated like human beings. And that goes for not only our customers, but also the people that we're looking to lead on our teams. So with that, I want to thank all of you. And if I can answer any questions at any point, please let me know. I'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn. If you have suggestions, love to hear from you as well. And I'll be around afterwards. Great, thank you.