Duray - VG - SEO (00:01) Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Wise Build Bridges. The Wise Build Bridges is a podcast that believes that in uncertain times, the wise build bridges, they share ideas, build connections and help others grow. On today's episode, I am joined by Lauren Tovey. Lauren is the marketing manager for Performer. Lauren, welcome to the Wise Build Bridges and thanks for being here. Lauren Tovey (00:24) Thank you for having me. Duray - VG - SEO (00:26) Lauren, firstly, I want to get into this right away. You've had quite a career thus far. Can you tell us how you fell into marketing? Lauren Tovey (00:37) Oh yeah, think falling in is quite apt. I did definitely fall into marketing. I did a degree in entrepreneurship and management a long time ago now. And I specialised in brand in my final year because I loved the creative side. I loved the strategy. And then what I did was I went into hospitality because that's where I'd been working while I was at uni. I did a grad scheme and then... Of course, what hit in 2020 was a massive surge of redundancy across the hospitality industry. And I was one of the 60 % of our our team to be let go, unfortunately. So I lived that furlough life for a little bit and I was desperately trying to find some work somewhere. And my friend said that there was a job going. in her laboratory, which is where she worked, where I had no experience. I ended up doing virology testing for a year, which had nothing to do with marketing or anything I wanted to do. But I really loved it. It was a great experience. And to be sort of contributing in that time was was quite a good feeling. It was a really good sort of team mentality there. But then after a year, I thought, okay, how can I, how can I use this, you know, place that I've ended up sort of falling into to sort of get where I want to go. So I started applying for jobs internally within NHS Blood and Transplant. And I ended up working as an assistant to the Strategy and Transformation Directorate. So they were across comms, marketing, project management, strategy, and that role gave me some really brilliant insights into strategy and how those organizations work, especially during the pandemic, which is really cool. And so yeah, I don't regret what, you know, that. that part of my career at all. think it was brilliant. And then after a little while, I thought again, I'd love to really get into a marketing or branding or content role, which is what I sort of geared myself up to. So I started looking around. I met Ben who is our CEO and he said that there was a job going at Performer. And you know, I'd never even really heard of Salesforce before because I'd come from hospitality in the NHS. and I didn't know what it was when I did the interview. I didn't really understand and to be honest it sounded to me quite boring. Sorry Ben if you listen to this. But when I fell into it I really realised that... It's actually not boring and the people that that work in Salesforce and in the ecosystem really love it and really believe in the power that it has. And yeah, it's been, it's been a real whirlwind these past sort of almost three years now that I've been at Performer and you know, I'm really enjoying it. I'm still, I'm still not done in this role. I think, I think there's a lot more to do. And we've grown loads and in the time that I've been here, I think I started and there were six, maybe seven of us. And now there's, you know, a team of 30. So. It's really cool to see where it's gone, yeah. Duray - VG - SEO (03:45) That's awesome. And for those that don't know what Performer is, can you sum it up for those who are very interested to know about, I think Salesforce is a name that's well renowned, but I know that you guys are the AI specialists in EMEA particularly, right? Lauren Tovey (04:00) Yeah, so we're a Salesforce consulting partner, a summit partner, which essentially means that If Salesforce as a platform is the building blocks for sales, marketing, HR, finance, whatever business department that you're facilitating the processes for, we almost take those building blocks and build them into something like using Lego. We build the system in a way that suits your business. We're sort of it's cheesy, but one-stop shop for anything Salesforce, whether you want to implement. one of their technologies, whether you want to have some support on it so that you can develop it, you can fine tune it, you can enhance it. We're sort of that go-to to make sure that you're getting the best return on investment that you possibly can. We, at the moment, our a... end goal is to be the leading partner for Salesforce AI in EMEA. So that's really our our specialism is all of the Einstein and agent force technology that's coming out now. You know, we work across the whole suite, we're Salesforce exclusive, so we only do Salesforce. But yeah, we've got a real head start with some exciting projects with our clients. And it seems to be sort of the way we're headed is to kind of really reach for the stars in terms of that, that niche. Duray - VG - SEO (05:23) So that's interesting, right, because like Viaduct, we are essentially an SEO agency slash consultancy, and I'm tasked with marketing a consultancy, which for those people who are listening to this podcast, this is what is happening. We are marketing. This is supposedly it. So it's a fun old game, but it is a challenge, in terms of how far do you go? I'm also conscious of the idea that people buy these fancy technologies like Salesforce or in my case HubSpot, don't use it effectively and they're not wasting money on an ongoing basis. tell me about maybe some of the use cases where Performa have really come in and absolutely smashed it. Lauren Tovey (06:06) Yeah, so I think what happens a lot of the time, like you just said, is people do adopt Salesforce, they're sold the dream, but what they've not maybe done is got their users on board first and sort of that internal adoption piece is the biggest part for us in the success of the technology going forwards because, you know, the leadership team might be fully bought into all of the value it can bring. But I think the people that are the end users that are using it day to day really need to understand that. And so that actually ties into a project that we went live with in, I think it was December with one of our clients Secret Escapes. and they were a pioneer in AI technology in the Salesforce world. So they were the first to go live with Agent Force, which is essentially Salesforce's new suite of completely autonomous AI agents. So they can actually act for you. They don't just sort of surface information. They don't recount things. They can actually take action within Salesforce. And so Secret Escapes, they did it in an amazing way. They started with the users. So they had a service team. They had, I think, five use cases for these agents, whether it was recounting flight information for their customers, whether it was special requests. So having, for example, a cot put into the room, amending their booking, changing things. So they had some really great use cases that were, you hopefully going to save their service team a lot of time. And their entire focus was keeping their team and keeping the human at the center. And we, you know, we love that approach. We've been working with Secret Scopes for a number of years now. And this project was so exciting because, you know, nobody had ever implemented this technology before. We were so happy to be involved in it because it was a really exciting time for our delivery team as well. And they, you know, they really kept those service agents at the heart of the project. You know, they were the ones that were testing the technology. They were the ones that were having their say, making sure that the answers that the AI was giving customers were the answers that they would give themselves. because it's a quote that they actually said in the case study interview that was, travel is a uniquely human experience. And so you don't wanna take the human out of it. And they've achieved some amazing things with AgentForce and Einstein, which is another one of the Salesforce technologies in that their aim was to sort of deflect cases, they're sort of like menial. cases that were easily sort of tackleable that were coming in at a high volume and sort of reduce that handle time by 15 to 20%. And I think at the moment we're achieving together around 45%, which is a massive, time saving for their service team. And it means that not only can they serve their customers 24 seven, but they also freed up those human agents to really put the time into those priority cases to make their customer service completely elite. and they're really sort of held as a really good example in Salesforce ecosystem of an agent force implementation. And they were the first as well. So it was a really cool project to be involved in. Duray - VG - SEO (09:37) Amazing. You said something interesting there, keeping the human at the center. And I think a lot of the people on the Wiseful Bridges and a lot of the marketeers and the founders that we're speaking to are conscious of that. That ultimately people buy from people. With the introduction of AI, this introduction has somehow been many, many years long, but I'm still thinking it's the introduction. How do we keep... humanity but also improve our efficiency in the best way through a marketing lens. Lauren Tovey (10:08) Yeah, so I think recently AI has done a bit of a disservice and I'm a culprit. I'm guilty here because I talk a lot about AI in our content, in our blogs, in our articles, in our podcasts, we talk a lot about it because that is what we're helping customers to utilize. But I think all of that content is becoming quite overwhelming for people and... as marketers, we hear all the time our jobs are going to be obsolete soon because AI is able to design and create content. And I don't necessarily buy into that because I think it might even go the other way where people are craving, you know, flawed content almost, you know, with a bit of wit and a bit of wry humor and those sort of uniquely human opinions that AI just can't replicate yet, and probably not for a long time. But I think, you know, what we're trying to do to stop that AI inertia is we're helping people to augment themselves. And that's a bit of a buzzword, but what that actually means is, know, it's like Iron Man stepping into his armored suit, right? Duray - VG - SEO (11:20) Yeah. Lauren Tovey (11:21) I don't think the content's helping because it's like AI is coming and we can't avoid it and it's gonna take all of our jobs. And that's quite stressful to a lot of people. And a lot of people don't know how to use it properly. I had a conversation with our CTO the other day and he said lots of people in big organizations are using ChatGBT, the free version to enter business data and ask it to create content based on their business data. Duray - VG - SEO (11:31) Yeah. Lauren Tovey (11:51) the leaders don't understand this is happening. And that is then going into a public space, know, that is accessible to the public. So I think, you know, we're still very much at the start of the education journey. And although you know, chat GPT is amazing, and I would be lying if I said I don't use it. I think, you know, there is a lot of learning to be done there. And I think, you know, because AI is feeding off of the content that we're producing. It's kind of going to end up consuming itself and regurgitating content as AI generated. And we're sort of a danger of not having anything real and valid and true and accurate be pumped out of this because we're not providing it the content and we're not using references and we're not really using trusted sources. So I think people need to view AI as not something that is replacing a skill or a job, but it's enhancing what we're doing. And I think, you know, I think people are savvy enough to understand that, you know, you can't just replace your workforce with AI, because you always need. the human touch because humans seek humans. I was on a chat bot the other day to sort out a subscription and it was just the most frustrating thing in the world. And you you always just want to talk to that human at the end of the day. And although agent force is really brilliant at, you know, augmenting and speeding everything up, making the productivity, you know, multiplying it, you're still going to need those humans to, let's say manage those, those digital employees. Duray - VG - SEO (13:17) Yeah. Lauren Tovey (13:34) So I think that's how we need to frame it. It's enhancing our lives, it's enhancing us. We're using AI, AI isn't using us and we don't ever wanna have that narrative. Duray - VG - SEO (13:45) Mmm. I love that. Let me ask you a question because I don't think there's anyone better in the world to answer this question. I almost always when dealing with a chat bot will be like, speak to human, humans please. I'm that guy like old soul running an SEO agency but want to speak to human. Give me the perfect example where I don't want to speak to a human, where it works brilliantly to not have to. Lauren Tovey (13:59) Yes. Okay, so let's say you are trying to return an item that you purchased. Let's say you're trying to return a jumper and you're trying to get through to a team and the wait's really long because it might be, let's say a small business who they don't have an army of support agents to help you any one time. So it's a small business that you purchase this item from and you get frustrated because they're not working. You they didn't work weekends, for example, you can't get through to them. You just want to get this done because you're going on holiday and it's going to go past the time that you're allowed to return the item. And, know, you speak to the chat and instead of it regurgitating just the information on how to return, it actually, you know, sends you the instructions. it asks you to confirm the details that it already knows because if we're talking about Agent 4 specifically, it pulls from data across your whole organization. So it knows what styles you might like. It knows who you are in this sort of unified profile, where you interact with the business, what purchases you've made in the past. So it understands you as a customer. may be better than a human can. And so not only can it actually process the return for you, instead of just, you know, sending you instructions, sending you to a confusing portal that you then have to enter in all the details, find the emails, it already has every piece of information that you possibly could need. It allows you to, you know, have the option of a collection or a drop off point, or you send it back. ⁓ And then once you've done that, it still recognizes that it would like you to become a loyal customer. It sends you a discount that is appropriate to the business and allows you to purchase another product. It gives you recommendations because it knows who you are, what you like. And all of that is done instantly. You don't have to wait for a human because it's the weekend and they might be taking a well-deserved break. And then, you know, they come back in on Monday and they realize that customers have bought more items because the agent has managed to say to them, hey, you're obviously like some of our products, would you like this item? We can offer you a discount. And then the customer's happy because instant return, easy peasy, it's all sorted for them. They feel like they're understood. They've had personalized service. And then the human agents that are running this small business, everything's in hand when they're away and they can pick up where they left off. Duray - VG - SEO (16:53) That does sound really useful. It's, it's kind of not dissimilar to the way that I'm quite often pitching SEO in the sense that like your sales team and I'm an advocate for outbound as well as inbound. like the nice mixture. I've got an outbound sales experience and now obviously sitting in bounds, supporting, supporting clients with their inbound strategy. But like I was the constant thing I'm telling like sales managers or, or CEOs is like your website doesn't have to go to sleep. It doesn't have to take breaks. Lauren Tovey (16:59) Mm. Duray - VG - SEO (17:23) It doesn't have to go on honeymoon. It doesn't have to like go out and be a human and not work. It's there all the time working for you. And I guess it's a similar argument here. These digital employees are able to actually execute on those basic fundamental tasks. Hey, if I could rock up into work and have some of my chat bot having sold some of my products already, I'd be pretty happy. Lauren Tovey (17:46) Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that's the point of it. You know, we're, we're sort of leaning on them in the times that we want to do other things. And I think, you know, that that's brilliant. That's exciting. Duray - VG - SEO (17:58) interesting I read a something like I forget the book's title now but it's something like how humans make themselves busier and they include efficiencies just to make themselves more busy. And this, think, is an interesting mark where we've got AI at such a level that it's actually able to support humanity with its roles. Now, do we as humans, history will say that we just get busier and busier by including more things to like free us up to do more stuff. But hopefully there's a world in which we can take a moment to breathe and take a moment to reflect and take a moment to, as you say, of embrace our humanity a little bit. But I'm getting a little bit too flowery here. I wanted to touch on... Lauren Tovey (18:42) Hahaha. Duray - VG - SEO (18:45) the difficulty in brand awareness in developing a consultancy. A lot of people in this podcast are in challenging niches. They maybe don't have as much of a USP as a lot of other businesses out there, and they're looking to stand out. Is there any advice you would give to someone trying to build that visibility in a crowded space? Lauren Tovey (19:08) Marketing a consultancy is such a huge challenge. And for me, know, when I first got into it, I thought, should it be this hard? Is there a magic formula? You know, I talked to so many peers in the space. I have an amazing mentor who I still work with to this day. And it wasn't really until I spoke to all of these people that I realized there's no magic formula in a consultancy. It's so hard to carve out a niche. ⁓ and to do it well, especially when you're competing with those big blue chip companies that can cross sell and upsell and they have loads of different streams that, you they can say, we already do your financial auditing, let's do your Salesforce as well. We can't possibly compete on that level. we look at, what are the benefits to working with a boutique consultancy like us? And it's the flexibility, it's the, you know, we really get to know your business and our team, because we really care about our team, we retain them, then that means our clients retain. those relationships that they've had with their, you know, our clients were a smaller team. So if you've been working with Tim on this project, you know, you'll still be working with him on the next potentially. And I think that's what people really like about boutique consultancies is, you know, the business really matters to us because we're smaller. And, you know, getting that project makes such a difference to us that we really care about the outcome. And I'm not saying that, you know, the bigger companies don't care about the outcome. That's not what I'm saying. But it's, it's critical to us. that it goes well and that the customers have a good experience and it hurts us if they don't. we, you know, we've got the stakes are higher for us. And I think standing out is, you know, something we're all trying to do desperately. I think, you know, we had a bit of a different approach actually and I don't know if it's because I am probably, you know, the only sort of... I say fluffy person in the organisation. I work with a lot of experts, technical people, know, they're so clever and technically minded and logical and I'm not logical. And I came in, you know, a couple of years ago, I looked at the ecosystem and what Salesforce does really well is it sort of... Duray - VG - SEO (21:20) Yeah. Lauren Tovey (21:34) It makes it user friendly and it makes the experience fun almost. So, you know, it makes the technology appealing and they have different mascots. They really sort of use the visuals to explain things. They have an amazing learning platform, which is super interactive. And I think it really does give people the confidence in the technology because they think, oh, you know, this appeals to me. I can understand it. It's not just lines of code and, you know, it looks like a giant spreadsheet that I can't work out. It's very user friendly. Duray - VG - SEO (21:39) Yeah. Lauren Tovey (22:04) And it's that friendliness that I latched onto. And I thought that, this is brilliant marketing because a lot of tech, when I go back to when I first joined and I thought, this might be boring, you know, a lot of tech is quite daunting and it's quite complex, but Salesforce is really good at breaking it down. And so I thought, you know, it would be great to emulate. that Salesforce exude because we are fun, we're a fun team, we're a friendly team. And I went to a world tour, which Salesforce world tour, massive thing in the ecosystem, it's probably the biggest event of the year in the calendar. And my first one, I looked around at the other stands and the competitors and I saw a lot of dark blue, a lot of monochrome, a lot of text and I thought, Duray - VG - SEO (22:40) you Lauren Tovey (22:56) they're all very similar. So what can we do differently when we hopefully sponsor? And the following year we did we were successful in getting a sponsor booth. And I it was one of the smaller ones because they're a smaller consultancy and we don't have a ginormous budget. And I thought, right, how do we how do we look different? How do we bring people over to start talking to us? And so my my friend is an illustrator. And I said, wouldn't it be great if we had a mascot? So worked with our team to come up with a mascot, which is an octopus called Pip. And the reason behind the octopus is, you know, he's flexible, he's a problem solver, he's knowledgeable, he's wise, he's friendly. He's got lots of arms to multitask. So, you know, that's, that's where we were going with it. And I said, okay, right. How about for the stand, let's just stick the giant octopus on the stand. No words, just Duray - VG - SEO (23:42) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Lauren Tovey (23:55) this giant orange octopus in the sort of sea of the dark colors. And ⁓ I think some people internally were concerned about, know, potentially coming across a bit too childlike for those decision makers in the organizations. And I completely understood that concern, but I thought, you know, people love the Salesforce brand where they've got these mascots and they break it down and they make it user friendly. You know, how about... let's see how it goes. Let's sort of throw caution to the wind. ⁓ So I convinced our CEO Ben to authorise a thousand plushy versions as well. Because I don't know if you know, but the Salesforce ecosystem, there's a massive thing about plushies. They've got plushy versions of their mascots. They're very coveted. You can buy them on eBay at extortionate prices. ⁓ We've actually got a giant version of Cody the bear in our office that's quite creepy in the dark. But people go mad for these. So I said, let's do that because we're a newcomer, we're the underdog, we need to get noticed, we need to get people to come over and talk to us. So we got a thousand of these made and we brought them over to our stand. We had the giant octopus sort of motif on our stand and we actually won an award for the number of leads that we generated because people were coming over to us and saying, well, I have to talk to you because of this giant octopus. I have to know. Yeah. And people come up to me and show me pictures of the octopus with them or with their child, their child's cuddling the octopus or it's with their dog or their cat. And people really... Duray - VG - SEO (25:21) I'm of those octopuses, right? Lauren Tovey (25:37) really love it and it's become something that people recognise for us. So I think we've leaned into it even more and it's given us the confidence because people kind of know us as the octopus guys and we're actually doing a bit of a brand refresh at the moment. So we're relaunching the website where PIP, the octopus has got more of a sort of permanent home because it was a bit of a scary idea at first to go down the different route and not have that sort of sleek consultancy look that's sort of more traditional. but make it a bit more playful and fun and sort of visual. So we'll see how that goes. The website is gonna launch, I think this week, so tomorrow. So yeah, I'll be excited to get some feedback on that. Duray - VG - SEO (26:23) Yeah, that's super, super exciting. Lauren, a couple of ⁓ quickfire questions. If there's one thing that you'd recommend to someone that is starting in marketing today, what is the one thing that you'd recommend that they do? Lauren Tovey (26:30) Mm. I think it is trust your instinct because everybody gets imposter syndrome at some point. And I think a lot of marketeers, know, there's a lot expected from a marketeer, especially in a smaller business, because you've got to wear so many hats, you've got to do so many different roles. And I think, you know, if I'd have really trusted myself earlier on, we wouldn't have potentially made some some costly decisions that they didn't quite pull off. You know, when I when I really thought actually, I don't know if we should be doing that. But I think I was too scared earlier on to say anything because I was new to the role. I was new to consulting, was due to Salesforce. But you know, I, I'd done my research and I did, I did know what would work. And I think if I just trusted myself, it took me finding, you know, my my mentor, for example, I mentioned earlier, it took me sort of finding her and chatting with her to sort of give me that confidence that I did have the right instincts and I did understand my market. But I think you've just got to be brave, you've got to trust yourself. And it is a lot of trial and error in consulting, know, the marketing and consulting, like I said, there's no secret formula, you've just got to believe that you know sort of the right move at the time. And if it doesn't work, fail fast, just start again and know that you'll get into the pace eventually and you'll find what works for your business and what works for your team. Duray - VG - SEO (28:12) think that's really good advice. I think what's struck me from our conversation today is that you had the bravery to kind of swim upstream against what was the typical ⁓ status quo at the Salesforce events where everything is blue, everything's a bit traditional, everything's stale, and you come in with this giant octopus because we're flexible and we're cool and we're fun and we care. And I get that as well, right? Like we are competing against the biggest SEO agencies in the world sometimes. and someone says well why does your team of 20 people they why should I choose you as over that 250 person thousand person agency and I think it's the care that we demonstrate right like I know all of my clients names or five other numbers that got them in my phone they've got mine I care for their success I'm checking in on their success whereas like if you join that big agency you're just client number one four three six five right and I think what you've demonstrated in this conversation I guess is that you've got to be you've got to be brave you've got to fail fast you've got to be willing to be wrong and if you kind of swim upstream you'll figure out what's wrong more often than you'll figure out what's what's right I guess and if that's not marketing then I'm not sure what is Lauren I think you you you're absolutely amazing if people want to get in touch with you where will they find you Lauren Tovey (29:37) Yeah, so we're on sort of all the main platforms, but being majorly B2B, we are quite prevalent on LinkedIn. So Performa on LinkedIn, and then our website is www.performa-it.co.uk, where you can check out our new website design. ⁓ yeah, curious to know what people think about that. Duray - VG - SEO (30:00) In that case, anyone that's listened to this, please do check out www.performer-it.com and send Lauren Tovey your feedback on LinkedIn. Lauren, thank you so much for joining the Wise Bull Bridges. been an absolute pleasure. Have a lovely day. Cheers, bye bye. Lauren Tovey (30:14) Thank you so much for having me. Bye.