Episode #174: Creating Effective Influencer Relationships, with Marshall Kirkpatrick

In part 2 of my conversation with influencer relations expert, Marshall Kirkpatrick, we answer the pivotal question, “why do I even need an influencer marketing program?” Then we move on to the third — and most important — stage of building your influencer relations program: collaboration. Finally, it’s a brief detour to discover what we can all learn from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is a social data innovator, and VP of Market Research at Sprinklr. Follow him on Twitter.

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Grad
I may be developing an unhealthy relationship with our new theme music. Randy, I am in love with this. This is like the best way to start a show. It just changes the whole feeling of this thing. But you did an awesome job on this … This is where you say thank you.

Randy
Oh, thank you.

Grad
Okay, well, thank you. I do appreciate it.

Randy
I didn’t compose this or play any of those instruments.

Grad
Oh, you told me you wrote it. (laughter)I believed you. All right, everybody, we’re back. It’s the Unified CXM Experience. This is part two of our influencer marketing influencer relations interview with Marshall Kirkpatrick, who’s VP of Market Research at Sprinklr, and for the Unified CXM Experience. I am your host, Grad Conn, CXO, or Chief Experience Officer at Sprinklr and welcome to the show. And let’s get back to it. Do you feel like we answered the question of, I need influencer marketing? Why?
Marshall
Um, we haven’t. But typically,

Grad
Because I heard Grad talk about it on the Unified CXM Experience is probably not adequate, although probably sufficient. But like, what is it? Is there a way to think about whether or not influencer marketing is a good idea for you? And whether or not you do need it? And if you do, how to think about it? We’re going through the steps on how to make it happen, right? Yeah. How do I even know that it’s a good idea for me?

Marshall
It is so ubiquitous in the marketing world now. And I feel like it is so important for anyone taking a product to market to be aware of who the key opinion leaders are in their market, and hopefully be a reciprocal awareness that there no question in my mind that every brand should consider it. I’d say that the appeal of influencer marketing as a flashy way to drive a lot of leads is something that so many people are drawn to, that most folks who are listening to this, and thinking about how to do it well, are going to be doing that because someone has come to them already and said, “we need to do some influencer marketing”, and hopefully, whoever it was that came to them with that request, is ready to hear that there is a maturity model, that there is some observation and some sophistication that is required in order to do it effectively. But just as likely, someone came to them and said, “throw some money around and do something superficial and hope that the leads come pouring in”. And then you’ve got another challenge to change that mindset. But I think that just about every marketer these days is presented with the opportunity to come up with an influencer plan.

Grad
So saying, “Do I need influencer marketing?” is a little bit like saying, “Do I need email?”

Marshall
I think so. Yes.

Grad
Okay. Gotcha. Okay. Well, that’s a good answer. Okay, let’s keep going on ‘I’m building out my influencer marketing program’.

Marshall
So the last part around engagement that I think is really important is about the importance of keeping a steady flow of activity going typically on social media already yourself. If you reach out to someone, and there’s nothing for them to look back at, that you’ve been publishing the day or the week prior, or if it’s not terribly exciting, then that’s a more common problem than you might think. I love the wisdom of that. Albeit sexist genius, Pablo Picasso who said, “you never know when creativity will strike but it prefers to find you working”.

Grad
I don’t remember that. I don’t know that quote. That’s an awesome quote.

Marshall
Yeah, I find it really inspiring as well.

Grad
Prefers to find you working. Wow, that’s fantastic. It’s so true, actually.

Marshall
And I think that that’s true also of effective relationship building with influential people. You never know when your outreach is going to land well. You never know when an opportunity is going to come up for collaboration, just a real natural smooth opportunity. You never know when someone else is doing work that would just fit in really well with what you’re doing. But they’ll come and they’ll see your pitch, they’ll see your outreach, they’ll see your engagement. And if you keep things rolling and keep the engagement frequency high, and your activity level high, then the right people will find you being interesting. And they prefer to find you being interesting so that they can think that it’s worth their time to engage.

Grad
Okay, I love that. That’s great. Yeah, that’s fantastic. I mean, this is not a quote from anybody, but you know, it potentially is that I’m just ripping it off. But I have always said that momentum drives momentum. Any action is better than inaction. So I’m a big fan of ‘just get started, for God’s sakes’, because that’s the hard thing. And then once you get going, you’ll figure it out, you’ll make it better. And you feel your way into it. I think iterative work is always more effective than pondering the universe, and then finally trying to do something because inevitably you’re wrong at the beginning. And this is an actual Napoleon quote, I think it’s Napoleon, which is ‘no battle plan survives contact with the enemy’. That sounds right, right? I think that’s Napoleon’s. He would organize things in really simple ways because you have these elaborate plans, but once everyone clashed, all hell broke loose, so to speak. And so he really was very hard to predict. And he actually spent a lot of time on observation of the battlefield to redirect and to think about how to make changes in the battle plan, once contact with the enemy was made. And I do think that as you do things, they cause changes in the system. And as you observe things that cause changes in the system, it’s only by observing those that you’re able to keep adjusting to make it really effective. I think that’s so true of influencer marketing, because what you say to them on the initial outreach, which may be well crafted and well thought through, may just be completely wrong for what they’re thinking and you’ll know, because no one responds to you.

Marshall
Agreed, agreed. But if you can point to something that’s already working too, and that’s already interesting and exciting, whatever that that may be, especially if you have the good fortune to be working with a known brand that’s going to increase your likelihood of success so much. You know, I remember, Grad, I hope you don’t mind me telling the story. But I remember, someone once asked you in a meeting that we were in, they said …

Grad
Uh, oh. Is it a good story or a bad story?

Marshall
It’s a good story. It’s a great story.

Grad
Okay. My palms just started spontaneously sweating.

Marshall
We’ll turn the table here.

Grad
I said something at a meeting. Okay, well, okay. Yeah. I’m braced. Okay. Oh, seatbelt on, I’m ready.

Marshall
So one of my favorite things, I feel that I want to take inspiration from this for the rest of my life. But someone said, “Grad why don’t we X, Y, or Z? When are we going to, you know, do this or that?” And you paused for a moment. And you said, “Oh, the train’s already leaving the station. Look at what’s going on here. We’ve got this going on. And that going on. And a bunch of us are on board. And we’re taking off, all you got to do is come and jump on board with what’s already happening, and the momentum has begun”. And it was such an inspiring response.

Grad
Just sounds like something I’d say.

Marshall
Yeah, yeah, it was great.

Grad
What did you like about that? What did you find inspiring about that?

Marshall
Um, it was well, in that case, it was such a way to turn a critical question back on the person who was asking it in a way that called them in, brought them into the fold. It kind of said, “You’re wrong about this, but we’re not going to focus on that; we’re going to focus on, you know, come on in with the rest of us”. It was just a delightful mix of warm and effective and the kind of thing that people respond to so well, what John Hagel calls an opportunity-based narrative. Everybody wants to be on a winning team and so whether it’s internal communication or influencer Relations and Outreach, if you can reach out and say, “Hey, you know us and you know me, we’re working on something really exciting here. And can we talk about it? You want to get on the phone and compare notes? One of the ways that I like to initiate a lot of next level engagements with influencers is to not jump straight to the ‘Hey, can we get married’, level of communication but to say, “We’ve been communicating on social media some, we’re working on some stuff that I think you’d find really interesting. And I bet you’re working on some stuff that you haven’t talked about yet, either. You want to get on the phone and compare notes?” And people love doing that. Especially in B2B, in my experience, I like to go first on those kinds of calls to kind of set the tone for the level of detail and intimacy and disclosure that are appropriate. And then we’ll turn it over and ask them, “Tell me about your projects. Oh, you’re about to come out with a book? Oh, that’s cool. You’re working on this new topic or theme? That’s great”. And then there’s opportunities to do what Dan Pink in his book, A Whole New Mind, refers to as symphonic thinking. He says one of the key skills in the future of work is the ability to draw connections between seemingly disconnected things. And so if you can get in there and mix it up and say, “Oh, you know how what we’re doing and what you’re doing could be connected in a way that’s mutually beneficial and interesting would be like this”. And most influential people are creative, dynamic folks that you show them a good project with momentum that they can connect with as well and that’s going to be one of the most interesting opportunities that they hear about.

Grad
Very cool. Okay. Love it. Okay. So where are we right now in our in our process of thinking about how to roll this thing out?

Marshall
We’re into the last stage, which is the collaboration stage.

Grad
Okay, great. Okay, let’s talk about that. It’s always my favorite stage.

Marshall
Well, what is it about that stage that you like so much, Grad?

Grad
Well, I think the most interesting thing about business, I probably said this before; you’re probably going to roll your eyes when I say this, because you’ve probably heard this a few times now, but fundamentally, humans are social animals. And a business, I think, is a great expression of social connection, because we sort of think we need all the things that we build and create every day, we don’t really need it. We could totally live in the forest, and we could forage, and we could live in a mud hut. And like, we don’t ….

Marshall
Okay, okay, if you insist …

Grad
I know you love that. But you don’t need anything. We’re animals. Raccoons don’t have high rises. But what makes humans interesting as an animal, sometimes people freak out when I talk this way, because it sounds like I’m describing humans in a third party like I’m not one and in fact maybe I’m not, but I am human. At least I bleed red; I’m not bleeding green. But I think what makes humans interesting is that we are extremely social. And it’s that social nature of humanity that made us effective hunters, in the earlier days, and so we could bring down a woolly mammoth, with a whole bunch of humans, whereas obviously, one human versus woolly mammoth, that’s a story that’s easy to write. Twenty humans versus a woolly mammoth, the woolly mammoth is probably not going to make it out of that one alive. So we’ve progressed now to a stage where we’re building these soaring office towers, incredible bridges, beautiful works of art; we’re doing amazing things. But while we don’t technically need it, we do it, I think, in large part because it’s how we connect to each other. So the reason that collaboration is exciting to me, and interesting to me, is that many of the tasks you’ve described already could be performed in a somewhat solitary way. I mean, they clearly would be better as a team. And there’s a lot of team sports stuff that can be built around, especially the identification stuff, and how to build the outreach correctly, etc., etc. But they don’t have to be a team. Whereas that collaboration stage and you’re going to dig into it more, that’s when everyone has to come together. And that, while actually, is the thing we love to do as humans is also a very difficult thing sometimes to do. And when you do it very effectively, in an organizational context, it’s powerful and exciting. And there’s nothing like seeing collaboration light something on fire. It’s the most exciting thing in the world, I think.

Marshall
Agreed, agreed it, but it is hard. And that’s why having a skilled, experienced practitioner, be the one kind of leading the charge makes a big difference. In early social web days, there were some folks that that drew a lot of comparisons to an old practice called tummeling.

Grad
Tumbling or tunneling?

Marshall
Tummeling, with an ‘m’; two ‘ms’, ‘e’ ‘l’ ‘ing’

Grad
I don’t know that word. Okay. Tummeling.

Marshall
It’s an ancient Jewish wedding function …

Grad
Okay, that’s cool.

Marshall
… where the wedding party would hire a tummeler whose job it was to come and get people dancing.

Grad
Isn’t that interesting? Well, I’m getting married. And it’ll be a Jewish wedding. So I should hire a tummeler. I didn’t know that was a thing. I’ll lay that on my fiancée, and I’ll say, “Have we thought through the tummeler strategy here”.

Marshall
Exactly. Invitations, cake, but where’s the tummeler, it’s the most important thing.

Marshall
So tummeling, again resurfaced in like the 1930s, 1940s, Eastern Seaboard resort culture, where the musicians and comedians, kind of like ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’. Have you seen that show?

Grad
I’m watching that right now; I’ve been holding off on Season Three. Season Four is about to come out. And I kind of missed Season Three, when it came out. I was busy. I don’t know what was going on. But I couldn’t really watch it. And so I just have held. And now Season Four is announced to come up soon. So now I’m like, rapidly pacing my way through Season Three, which is incredible. Incredible. So yeah, I’m all over that; great show; my hero.

Marshall
So people in that function, whether they’re musicians, or comedians, many times would be hired with the understanding that they would be in charge of providing entertainment at night, on stage, but during the day, they would be hanging around the card room and the side of the pool, acting as a social lubricant and saying, “Oh, Grad, that’s really interesting what you do for a living, have you ever met Randy, he was just telling me the other day about something similar, we’ve got to get the two of you together”. And now it was their job to facilitate relationships. And now in social media, there’s a huge opportunity to do that online at scale. And I’m of the belief that that’s a really good way to lay the foundation for engagement, and collaboration with influencers, to be actively building connections between people and people in your brand and just cultivating a positive atmosphere, at which point, it becomes a much easier lift, to say, ‘hey, let’s do something together. Let’s make some content. Let’s come to my event, let’s do a webinar,’ because everybody’s just all ready, they want to dance, and you get it rolling. And so those are in one way the ‘observe, orient, decide, act’ model too is one where, when we’re early in influencer marketing, a lot of people presume that the deciding is really important. And the acting is where most of the time and resources are going to go in. But generally in an OODA loop, the Air Force recommends too that you invest most of your energy in observe and orient.

Grad
Oh, interesting, okay.

Marshall
If you spend enough time and do a good enough job, knowing the landscape and thinking about how your strengths can connect to the people in that landscape, and cultivating relationships and what have you, then the ‘decide’ and ‘act’ part become much easier. So then you create content together, you do something together. And the last thing in this model that I would share Is another perhaps counterintuitive sort of a thing but something that Forrester points out. A couple years ago they said that the savviest brands in the world now, after a few years of influencer marketing have realized that it is early in the maturity curve of influencer marketing, that we presume influencers are going to bring all the reach. If only we could pay this person to say our name, then the cash would start flowing in. And certainly in some markets it that can work that way but misalignment with brand and influencer will break it, and the algorithms on social platforms too are such that the savviest brands in the world, Forrester says, now know, that they should not rely on influencers for reach; they should look to those influencers for world class content that can break through the noise, and that the brand then amplifies with paid media.

Grad
Interesting. Okay. That makes sense. That’s a smart redirect on that one. I like that. Do you have this written down, not written down, a diagram on this OODA Loop? Or do you have any assets on this you could send to Randy because we’ll post the podcast on the website, and on the blog, and it would be nice to have some of these kinds of accompanying diagrams.

Marshall
Yeah, I have. I’ve made some diagrams and tweeted them out over the years, especially when it’s ….

Grad
Even if it’s just hand drawn. It would be great. Yeah, just sent us a load of tweets.

Marshall
I will do. You know I don’t have a static strategy, or even a playbook. A lot of it is up in my head. And I refresh it every time. I refresh my influencer lists every time. I refresh and iterate on the strategies time. And that’s what keeps it fresh and authentic too.

Grad
Interesting. You know, actually, speaking of tweets, I did a presentation in Boston about a month ago, a month and a bit ago. You know this person; I can’t remember his name right now. He was another influencer. And his whole speech was just a set of tweets that he’d done. Did you remember my talking about him? Yeah, Evan Kirstel. Right. It was awesome, too. He did a great, he did a fantastic job. Better than great. It was fantastic. I loved it. But what was so fascinating about is that about three slides in you think, “Hey, wait a second. He’s just showing tweets that he’s done, like, with his slide deck”. And then I did this tweet, and he had a narrative that he drew between the tweets, but it was so fascinating, I’d never seen that before. It was great. And it basically takes the content that he generates on X, formerly Twitter, and then, you know, slaps that into a deck and can stand up in front of a crowd anywhere. Brilliant.

Marshall
He may have been showing his most successful tweets that night; he may have tested out concepts, just like a comedian will write a lot of jokes that they play in small stages, see what gets the most laughter and then put just those hits together into a show to play Madison Square Garden. And everyone thinks, “Oh, my goodness, every joke is hilarious”. But it’s because they iterated on a smaller stage.

Grad
Yeah, Mrs Maisel, the episode I just saw, she’s going to be opening for a music act, Shy Baldwin. And I think it’s just theoretical, I don’t think it’s a real one. And she’s testing out some material prior to opening in Vegas for him; she’s going to be his opening act. And it’ll be like a thousand people in Vegas. And so she’s in the small comedy club where she got her start. And she’s trying out material. And it’s great, because it’s a show, you know, they can have the audience react any way they want. So they want to show her bombing. Although I thought the jokes were really funny. One joke was, she said, ‘I’ve been traveling a lot. And it’s interesting when you travel, you often sort of forget about the things that you don’t spend a lot of time with, and you don’t think about them anymore, you know … like your children”.

Marshall
Oh …

Grad
Hilarious! And the audience is dead silent, right? Hmmmmm, an air conditioner, that’s it or something. The second one was, then she goes, she goes, ‘airlines….’ and this is like late1950s; it was 1960 I think and it’s actually a very funny show. There’s another really great line too. So she said, “Airlines are always complaining about kids on the plane. And, you know, people don’t like having kids on the airplane because they’re noisy, making noise. And people are always complaining about kids on the plane”. She goes, “If that’s true, if airlines really don’t want kids on the airplane, then why do they make those little, tiny kid-sized bottles of booze for them?”

Marshall
Oh, yeah, those are great.

Grad
Total, like the cuds are looking at her like…, and then there’s another line, this show’s full of jokes. There’s another one, which was her father. He’s been arrested. And now he’s working with all these like, communists, not communists but like, you know, they’re like ….

Marshall
Red Scare era type stuff?

Grad
Communist is not quite right. It’s all these kids who actually are communists, but it’s all about, you know, they’re all protesters and revolutionaries, and they’re singing the Internationale and all this kind of stuff. And …. Oh man, I actually forgot the joke. I got into describing the scene so much. Okay, give me a second. I’ve got another kid joke and then I’ll do this one. So then another kid joke – this was a different comedian. But I thought it was another funny kid joke. She’s a super young-looking comedian. Very young, very, very attractive. Looks like she’s like 25, you know, maybe? Definitely looks like 20s, early 20s, mid 20s at the most, right? She’s not. She’s actually quite a bit older than that. But she just has this really young look. And she’s gorgeous. And she says, “You know, I have four children”. And as soon as she says that you think, “Wow”, really, because you find yourself thinking to yourself, “Wow, she looks like great for having four kids and really young to have four kids” just like it’s a spontaneous thought when she says, “I have four children”. And she says, “I often get the question. Were they adopted?” which again, and I’m deconstructing this a little bit, so it won’t be quite as funny because I do that that way. But I’m also not her and I’m also mostly not on video for most people listening to this. And when she says that you think to yourself, “yeah, maybe that’s why she’s so young, and has four children, because she adopted them. That makes sense, right?” So you’re kind of …. the thing about what makes a joke work is the surprise of it, right? Then her answer to that question – so she said when people ask her if her children were adopted, she goes, how did she put it, it was so well done. She says, “No, we tried, but they were too old”.

Marshall
Oh, yeah.

Grad
Anyway, so going back to Internationale crowd. So the joke on that one, which is super fun is they were coming up with the name of their broadsheet. They were going to do a revolutionary broadsheet, and publish it, and Abe who’s Miriam’s father on Mrs. Maisel, Miriam Maisel. So Abe is, a professor at Columbia, just got dismissed and so he’s looking for his new thing. And he’s trying to connect with these kids who are eating him out of house and home. And they come up with two suggested titles for the broadsheet. One is, ‘It’s all about the jive’. And the other title is, ‘It’s the 60s, man’. Those are the two broadsheet titles they’re proposing. And Abe goes, “Ah, those are great titles. They’re timeless.”

Marshall
Oh

Grad
I loved it. Because it’s like, oh my gosh, what was less timeless there? ‘It’s all about the jive’ or ‘It’s the 60s, man’.

Marshall
Oh, yeah.

Grad
Oh, my gosh. So what were we talking about? You said Mrs. Maisel and I went off on this tear telling jokes.

Marshall
Well, comedy is a lot like influencer relations, or vice versa.

Grad
Okay, let’s go with that for a second. Build that one out.

Marshall
People sometimes say, “If you want quality, go for quantity”. Take a lot of shots and roll. Instead of just stressing out about your one big shot, you know, your one big outreach to somebody, chances are it’s going to look like someone who hasn’t been out there in the mix. If instead you can do something that … I once took a singing workshop from a wonderful New Yorker who travelled around the country, teaching people to sing. And he said, “Lower the stakes when you get up to sing, just lower the stakes, and it’s going to be all the easier to do”. And the same is true with influencer relations, you want to just be out there mixing it up, making contact with great frequency, and no single communication is going to make or break the whole thing, just lower the stakes for them. And before you know it, your exciting project that you’re just reaching out to friends about; someone’s going to bite and you’re going to be able to collaborate, hopefully do something really great together, but don’t shoot one shot, take a piece of content, break it up into multiple different formats just like Evan Kirstel did in that story that you told and then take whatever content worked best just like whatever joke was the funniest and invest more in it, amplify it with paid and so many of those entertainer and communication skills that have been honed for centuries in other contexts would serve us really well to be applied here in influencer marketing and influencer relations today.

Grad
Very cool. I like the way you did that. That was awesome. I think that might even be a good wrap up so how do you feel on this? Is there anything else that the audience should know or think about in the area of influencer marketing? Do you feel like we’ve pretty much drained the pond on this one or do we do we have anything else?

Marshall
Well, there is a there’s a doorknob topic, if you will.

Grad
A doorknob topic, okay. Yeah. Oh, this is like the Colombo as ‘just one more question’ kind of thing.

Marshall
It’s something to just say on the way out the door. And that is that there’s a big opportunity for those of us doing influencer marketing, influencer relations today to hop on board. The shift towards values-oriented consumers; in the United States, it’s especially young people; in Europe, it’s not just young people, it’s people of all ages are making decisions based on the impact that brands have on the world. And then they’re making purchasing decisions that are really informed by their values. And influencer marketing, by default, often ends up going back to the same people, time and time again. And in many industries, not in all, but in many including Intacct, the usual suspects are the usual suspects, you line up a bunch of influencers that you might want to connect with, and they will be disproportionately white and male. And there is a big opportunity to go beyond those usual suspects, and bring in additional new voices, who are changing the demographics of the workplace, and who can bring perspectives that can really speak to the values-oriented consumer. And so, what I recommend is that people in the observe and orient stage, invest in building out some listening channels, specifically to people of color, and women in their industries. Go out of your way to deliberately build out your reading list to include those voices. This is presuming that maybe you are, as you’re listening to this, maybe you’re a woman of color, or you know, that’s your own demographic group. But most influencer algorithms, and if you just look at who’s already popular today, in many industries, that won’t be who you pick up. But building out a deliberate reading list, bringing in perspectives outside of traditional dominant perspectives will be super helpful. And then, when you make your list of people that you want to engage with, stop halfway and ask yourself, “What does this list of people look like? What are the lived experiences of these people?” And in many cases, it can be good to then say, “You know what, we need to be deliberate about who we …, let’s add some folks that that come from outside of the usual suspects to make sure that we’ve got a good, well-rounded, diverse set of perspectives. That’ll improve the relevance of your content and your marketing. It’s going to help it land more effectively. And it’s going to make it more relatable to all the people that you want to reach out there”.

Grad
Right? That’s a great point. Yeah. How do you see it fitting into ESG programs? Define that real quick. I think most people know what ESG is now. But let’s just define that really quick.

Marshall
Yeah, it’s an acronym for Environmental, Social, and Governance, meaning the impact that your organization has on the environment; on social power dynamics, like gender, race, sexuality; and governance, around the ethics and the operational justice of the organization and engaging with it. That’s a really good question, Grad. I was speaking to someone the other day, that had just joined a company. And she said that the company’s ESG initiatives were not what she was going to work on directly, but they were really important to her decision to join the company. And I said, “But how did the company position themselves around that?” And she said, “You know, the hiring manager that was interviewing me, not only referenced that they had a working group on women in the workplace and diversity in the workplace, but that person knew all of the specific initiatives that those groups were working on. They could demonstrate an authentic connection there. And so when reaching when you get on the phone with influencers to exchange briefings, and if you’re reaching out to a diverse set of people, if you’re able to reference credibly and meaningfully and genuinely some good work along those lines, that may make all the difference in your ability to build those new connections and collaborate with a diverse set of influencers.

Grad
Very cool. That is a great doorknob topic. I love that. That’s awesome. Okay, well, Marshall, this has been really fun. We went a little longer than I expected, this will probably be a two-parter. I’ll have to record an in and out on this one, but well worth it. I feel like this is a great chapter on influencer marketing and people will be well served by following this advice. And maybe we’ll do a follow up. I would love to drill into some of the things that we’re doing at Sprinklr and some examples there and we can keep following it and keep looking at how that works. And of course, you know, you can use Sprinklr for influencer marketing with the influencer marketing module that’s in Sprinklr as part of the Unified CXM platform.

Marshall
Yep, I just used it yesterday.

Grad
Just used it yesterday? Fantastic, so that’s the thing you’re slacking me right now, probably. Sometimes these tools are separate, but they’re a lot more effective when they’re connected to the content marketing platform so you can use the content that exists in them in the enterprise and all the social listening, all the social media management, you know, all that kind of stuff. If it’s all one package and one parcel, then you’re going to have a much more effective program. So check it out, Sprinklr influencer marketing. Okay, well, I’m going to wrap. Any last words, Marshall, anything else you want to add before I call us out on this one?

Marshall
It’s been such a pleasure, Grad. Thanks so much for having me on here. I just enjoy working with you so much. And what a fun thing to do together here. Congrats on all the momentum you’ve built on the show. This train has left the station. Yeah, time to get on board, folks.

Grad
You know, one thing I didn’t mention at the top, but you did a show called Coffee Club for a while. I’m going to say two years. Am I right about that?

Marshall
Yep. Yeah, timeless, truly timeless content.

Grad
Well, really and you did big shows. Guests every time, on video. And you had some amazing guests and Coffee Club still is available.

Marshall
Yep. It’s on our YouTube channel.

Grad
So if you want more of Marshall and who doesn’t want more Marshall, check it out. Coffee Club, Sprinklr Coffee Club. I loved that series, and I may actually start to extract some of those shows into the unified CXM Experience so that we don’t have to work as hard. Just kidding.

Marshall
Well, you build relationships. And then you don’t have to work as hard, and you can make it look easy.

Grad
And make it look easy. Yeah, that’s what it’s all about. All right. Well, thank you very, very much for the time. Sorry, we went over but I think the next meeting is our meeting anyway. So we’ll just kind of keep that ball rolling. And what I’m going to do is wrap now. Thank you, Marshall, for the time. Marshall, VP of Market Research at Sprinklr has been our guest today talking about influencer marketing or influencer relations, depending how you want to look at it. This has been the Unified CXM Experience. For the Unified CXM Experience, I’m your host, Grad Conn, Chief Experience Officer at Sprinklr and we are going to see you … next time.