Ragnarokast E15 Transcript

Steven

I’m Steven. 

Spencer

And I’m Spencer. Welcome to Ragnarokast, your podcast for all things marketing and MarTech. 

Steven

Hello everyone. 

Both

We’re the Co-CEOs of Ragnarok. 

Spencer

Wait, was there more after that? 

Steven

Nope, that’s the intro. 

Spencer

Oh, whoa. You caught me off guard there. Hello everyone. Hi Steven. Hi guest. 

Steven

Hi Spencer. Hi guest. Hi Selin

Pat

Hey guys. 

Spencer

Alright everybody. Today we have Patrick Rondinelli from Twilio Segment. 

Pat, do you mind giving us introduce and introduce, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna correct that and introduce to yourself and to your company.

Pat

Yeah, Absolutely. First of all, thanks for having me, Spencer and Steven. it’s a pleasure to be here and it’s been a, a pleasure working with you over the past year or so. I’mPatrick Rondinelli, I, I am on the Segment team, Twilio Segment on the on the partner team booking after partnerships like systems integrators, like Ragnarok, a little bit about Segment. We are a customer data platform effectively. Really what, what our platform does is it gathers customer first data and really makes it easy for then customers to leverage that data in a marketing sort of context. You know, traditionally it’s very difficult for organizations to wrangle different kinds of data and within their environment we simplify that dramatically and then make it easy for marketers to then activate on that data.

Spencer

 Wow. Did you remember all that Steven? No, we, 

Steven

Wait, did we just describe a CDP? 

Spencer

Yeah.  What, what is this? No, we’ve been a segment partner for six years now. 

Steven

Are you sure? It’s not 14 years, Spencer? It feels like it’s been a long time.

Spencer

It’s 14 years in Steven years if, if you hear Steven d no, it’s been six years. 

I actually remember doing the segment certification, the initial partner certification that, that you all came out with when there was a severe like blizzard in New York and I was on the ferry to Hudson County, New Jersey. And I was like, I thought the boat was gonna like sink. And so to distract myself as it was going very slowly across the water and rocking back and forth, I was doing the certification on Skill Jar, whatever it was at the time. 

And then I, I waited forever at a inside of a bank to, to get picked up by a cab. But I actually, I finished the certification that day. It was like eight hours long, but it was like the first partner certification that I ever did. And it actually, I learned a lot about the Segment platform. 

Steven

So when the, when the boat’s really creaking underneath you in order to find comfort and solace, you go do partner certifications. 

Spencer

Exactly. I mean that’s where my head’s at. 

Steven

I mean, if the Titanic sinking baby, like at least I’m gonna be certified before this puppy goes down, you know? 

Spencer

Yeah. Like, let me get one more under Ragnarok. You know, listen, that guy, you know, his boat sank, but listen, can we count it? Can we count it? 

Steven

He gets a badge. 

Spencer

Yeah. Alright, so why are we here today? So we actually gotta give Pat some credit here. Patrick Rondinelli, before we originally gave him a prompt and he, he said, well, how about we structure it this way instead? And I actually think it’s our Pat Pat Asbra. 

And I thought that was actually like a much better way to look at it, which is why should you work with both a, a SaaS partner and an agency partner when implementing the tool and 

Steven

Not to be self-promoting here? Right? 

Spencer

Yeah. Yeah. Well, not to be self-promoting, but to be self-promoting a little bit, you know, as an agency we don’t have a platform. What is success for us is helping our clients find success, not necessarily using a specific platform that we have when a, a partner brings us in. There’s a lot that goes into that. And so I think we should just jump into it. Like, Pat, if you don’t, if you don’t mind opening us up here, like why should a a, a marketer or, or a CTO bring in segment and, and an SI partner at the same time versus an all-in-one or, or other options. 

Pat

There’s a lot of good reasons to do that, but really they just kind of frame it up and and simplify it here at, at the start of the conversation. You know, at the end of the day, Segment is really good at building this platform, right? We, we, we have a tool. It works really, really well when it’s deployed within a customer environment. It’s often, in fact, almost always right, 99% of the time it is, it is not the only tool inside of that stack and that inside of that technology stack. And so the, the Segment platform has a number of dependencies. Where’s the data come from? How is the data structured? 

Where’s that data sent? And then how can the customer optimally leverage it to reach their business goals? 

And with, and within that construct, there’s going to be a number of choices the customer has to make. And from everything from technology to how do they deploy their teams and how do they operate this new machinery? ’cause typically they’re gonna be moving off, let’s say a, some more legacy tools to these more modern kind of SaaS tools. Enter the agency like Ragnarok where you guys, your your primary agency, let’s say our marketing teams and marketing individuals at customers. And so your, your expertise in terms of having seen this many times before and having done this many times can ultimately benefit the customer because you can get them to their end state much faster than if they’re trying to do it on their own. 

In other words, the customer’s gonna be buying segment, they’re gonna be buying some other tools, but likely they may not have the athletes within their organizations to optimally and quickly get to their end state. 

But Ragnarok this is what you, this is your bread and butter, right? This is what you guys do every day. And you’re able to connect those dots from a technology standpoint, from a people and processes standpoint, and then ultimately help help that customer get to that end state via roadmap that you’ve seen many times. 

Steven

Yeah, I think that’s an interesting way to describe it is, you know, we have different, we have the same but different goals, right? And ultimately, like the platform is but a means to achieve whatever use cases or, or goals as you, you know, mentioned them, right? Like the platform gets us there. Either it shortcuts things or it adds capabilities or does something for us that we couldn’t do or we could do, but very painfully, right? The idea here of bringing in Segment is supposed to really streamline this stuff when, and you know, I almost see our role kind of coming into this as, you know like, like, like like Caron, right? 

Like we’re sort of guiding the ship, so to speak, in terms of, well how do you, how do you kind of get, like you, either you’ve selected or you understood that there’s a gap here and a need. How do we kind of decide when we bring in the technology, like a we what technology even bring period, right? Like Segment of, fortunately it’s a phenomenal solution that works for a lot of different use cases and a lot of different verticals business. But then also to define, alright, well how do we actually install it, instrument it in a way where we can use it. ’cause it’s enterprise software, right? Like it doesn’t, like, yes you can open it out of the box and deploy it, so to speak and that will get you some runway. 

But most enterprises have fairly sophisticated use cases that a lot of those outta the boxings are really just foundational at their, at their go get, right? And they’re foundational for a certain set of structured data. 

And I know that, you know, Segment when it started, and we were very kind of early on partnering with it, is it’s always sort of had this engineering mentality mindset, right? Of like, you know, like you could plug it in and it will work, which it does. Fortunately. Can’t say that with a lot of tools, but there’s definitely a lot of reliability within the platform. But also, like, you could, and and I remember kinda early on using Segment back in 2017, 2016, like very, very early on it was, you know, like engineering team just, just ran the whole thing and there wasn’t a whole lot of like marketing science behind it, right? 

Essentially I wanted to put data into, into Iterable or I wanted to put data into Braze or into my meta, or I wanted to do CAPI conversion, API and these different tools. I didn’t need a whole lot of sophisticated like, marketing folks come in here and do it. Like the use cases were pretty standard. You know, I want page views, I want checkouts, I want product ads, you know, things like that. They’re pretty simple concepts and Segment was, was awesome out the gate. ’cause you just just plug all that stuff in and it works really easily as you guys, I would say over the last 5, 6, 7 years even especially post Twilio acquisition, like there’s just more and more enterprise level businesses using Segment. 

It’s a much more sophisticated platform now. You know, it’s, and having that foundation as being an engineering platform certainly makes that easier to sort of adjust into that. You’re not, like, there’s no like janky process in the background, right? Like everything’s in front of you in terms of what you need to, you need to do. There’s no like CSV uploads that you have to run, fortunately. Like it actually works. And I find that, especially with enterprise businesses that are coming from that historical, like, oh, what’s your FTP process? You know, how what CSVs do I have to upload? What what times can I upload things Like that’s, that’s such a shift in mentality, right? 

And I feel especially in the enterprise side of things, we’re kind of undergoing these digital transformations. I I feel like 80% of the work we do up front is just helping people to prepare mentally for how to think about working in a modern system, right? Because a lot of them, their first step is Segment, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re probably still on a, a, an Adobe or a Salesforce or an Oracle, some type of legacy platform system. And they’re not on, you know, more of the modern stuff. Like you guys are kinda the entry point for a lot of MarTech because you solve the necessary data problem to do new MarTech, right? 

And so I think that that’s such an interesting, you know, like, like what I always think about, like that’s, that’s kind of like our purpose is, is kind of like guiding that, like that mental model then everything else follows, right? Then there’s all the execution and the stuff that goes and actually getting the platform up and running. But that change, mental change management, I feel like is, is the hardest part. But 

Pat

You know, that mental change, I think a big part of that for customers is envisioning, okay, I’ve got this platform, there’s all these tools out there. How do I bring it all together and what does my end state look like? Or what is possible? What should I be shooting for? 

And because you’ve, you’re, you’re in this space and you’ve, and you see it every day and you’ve been seeing it for the past, you know, six, seven years, you can help the customer to your point, create that mental model of, okay, we’re here today, we’re go, we want to get there and here’s what good looks like. 

I think that, that, that is invaluable and, and especially, and you overlay that with your vertical and an industry expertise. And I think, you know, that’s just phenomenal for a customer. And I’ll give you an example. I had one of my account reps reach out to me, they were talking to a media company and the media asked her, who is a Segment salesperson, I’d really, I’d like to talk to an agency about use cases that they have actually deployed in real life leveraging the Segment platform very specific vertical, right? With very specific use cases. Not everybody at Segment has worked in the media space and we’ve sold into media, but those are oftentimes in a very kind of horizontal kind of way, not in a very vertical specific solution. 

So I just happen to be talking to Patrick and Selina and they were able to quickly share with our teams some very specific use cases around media to improve business metrics that, that media teams care about. 

I think the TE technology is a, is a, is a big part of it, right? But also that expertise that’s fundamental to customers that are trying, because they’re in a very specific vertical trying to solve very specific and get to a very specific end state with the solution. I think that bringing in si like Ragnarok provides a lot of value to the customer and accelerates how, how fast they get to where they wanna go. 

Steven

Well, off 

Spencer

Off of that, I want to ask, we won’t name any names, but what would you guys say is the benefit of bringing in an agency and a SaaS platform rather than some of these companies out there that have like a very large services team where they do all the stuff in-house? ’cause that does exist out there. Sometimes it’s an agency that builds a platform. Sometimes it’s a platform that builds an internal agency. What are the pitfalls of that or not? Like what, what do you see the benefit of this sort of using Segment as Ragnarok and Ragnarok as an example? 

Pat

That’s a great point. So here at Segment, we, we do provide professional services, advisory services to help customers stand up the platform. 

And our teams are really, really good at helping customers run and operate the Segment platform. The value to bringing in, in addition to that or in in place of that in some cases where customers may want to work with an agency like Ragnarok that has those segment, that Segment expertise is that your expertise doesn’t stop at Segment, right? Your expertise goes beyond it. You, Steven, you mentioned Braze and, and Iterable. So, you know, our teams, our our pro services team are not going to be Braze experts. And there’s a lot of things that need to happen in Braze to leverage the data that’s being sent to them by Segment. 

So effectively, right? The  services that Regnarok and an integrator and an agency can provide are going to be, let’s say, much more holistic from a marketing standpoint than simply leveraging the SaaS services. Because nine times out of 10, those services are gonna be focused on, on that platform and expertise past the, that that platform are gonna be somewhat limited. 

Steven

Yeah. That, and, and yes, I think in, in the majority of the, the projects we work on, the clients we work on, you know, the platform knowledge is, it’s helpful. I mean the, you know, it’s helpful in terms of establishing a center of excellence and getting their team ramped up. But the, the value for a customer is not to be the long-term. Like internal, you know, is not to out essentially effectively not to outsource competency, right? Like they want to outsource capability or they want to outsource extension, but to be competent in a core tool is something that they see as a, you know, there’s a curve to it, but eventually they wanna own that internally. 

And that makes complete sense, right? You don’t wanna have dependability on something that’s foundational your business, especially something in a tool like, like segment 

Spencer

Dependency. 

Steven

Oh yeah. Not dependability, dependency. 

A little, little dependent, dependent, independent 

Spencer

Dependability is, is nevermind I’m, 

Steven

Yeah, are you dependent? 

Spencer

You don’t wanna have, you don’t wanna have the dependency, not you do wanna have dependability, you don’t wanna have dependency, 

Steven

But you wanna be independent 

Spencer

Yes. 

Steven

Of dependencies. 

Spencer

Wait. So, 

Pat

And, and getting and getting to that independence, it, it is something that, that, again, that an agency can help them do, right? We we’re it here at Segment, we’re going, we’re going to be the experts on the platform and maybe a little bit past it. And certainly we can provide some advisory services in terms of how best to set it up with those, with the other tools and those quote dependencies. But ultimately that machinery has to run and for the customer to become independent, getting advice from an agency like yourselves that you have those athletes that operate, that mar that larger marketing stack, I think is invaluable. 

Steven

We call it Marthletes

Spencer

Marthletes 

Steven

Marketing, marketing, MarTech athletes, marthletes

Pat

Marthletes

Spencer

You want dependable Marthletes in order to become independent. 

Steven

I love it. You know, Pat, there is this, I’ve been seeing a lot of this discussion around this. This is something that we address a lot in our, we’ll call it like marketing consultation and, and sort of tool selection processes that we run with our clients, which is this concept of total cost of ownership or, or, or you know, the popular acronym now TCO, which is, is sort of trying to find a way to define like, you know, like, look how much does this cost me beyond the platform licensing fee? As we talk about the differences between, you know, like one all in one platform where maybe that is more obscured or there’s some services around that, but maybe not, they’re not comprehensive enough. 

And essentially, you know, clients are trying to build out an internal, you know, capability around it and there’s some cost around that. There’s manager time, there’s, there’s executor time, there’s things like that, you know, how does, how, how do you, how do you would segment like kind of think about, I mean we obviously have our own metrics that we use for that, but how do you kind of think about that from, you know, preparing customers to sort of understand and, and to sort of have a, a dimensionality around, you know, like, hey look like this is what you’re gonna pay us from a licensing fee perspective, but this is what it actually costs to run this. 

And you know, better yet, how do you sort of define out what is the, what is their expected return on that investment? 

Pat

That, that’s an interesting question. We do here at Segment. We do provide, as part of the sales process and the pre-sales consultancy, a value engineering motion. And so what we will do is we have folks within the value engineering team that our sales teams will engage in this process. 

And some of the things that they look at is, you know, without Segment as an example, what is the cost to you from a people and process perspective to wrangle all this data and then standardize it and make it, operationalize it and create this data pipe of customer data that then you can leverage downstream or within our tool. So we do have some aspects of, of value and total cost of ownership that we can compare versus some of our competitors from an overall, again, you know, marketing technology aspect, you know, our visibility kind of oftentimes ends a little bit past Segment and you know, depending on what other tools the customer may have or what tools they’re coming from and what, what their resources look like in terms of ramping up and, and a learning curve, again, we will lean heavily on agencies like Ragnarok to help us with that, right? 

We, we, we’d like to bring in these agencies and really help us kind of figure that out along with the customer. 

Spencer

This is where we’ve seen in the past few years. I probably mentioned this on the podcast before, but you know, in the last two years when there was all the tech layoffs and e-commerce layoffs, the kind of post pandemic boom went the other direction. Steven and myself and our team have found that a lot more CFOs are in conversations, a lot, even CEOs and they look at companies like Ragnarok tools like Segment and they say, yeah, it’s all great. I’m glad that it makes your job easier, but, but what am I getting out of it? What is, you know, what kind of return on investment am I getting? 

And we’ve made up a, I’m sure there’s another, another acronym out there, but we’ve made up an acronym we call ros, R-O-M-P-S, return on MarTech and people spend, which is essentially the total cost of ownership or their, you know, revenue minus the TCO. 

But as an agency, that is one thing is we take into account the cost of Segment, the cost of the email tool, the analytics tool, anything else that’s in our purview as well as ourselves, as well as the cost to the customer on and having to dedicate resources to work with us or, you know, even platform champions for things that maybe we’re not as involved in, but maybe we should get involved in. So whether or not it’s officially given to us, which it more and more is like we take the, that return very seriously and it’s not just for us, it’s for, we, we want our partners to find success, we want our customers to get the most value out of these platforms. 

So it’s not, well it, it can be self-serving, obviously we want to keep getting paid. It’s like really like the end of the day, if the customer is succeeding, everybody else succeeds. That’s right. 

Steven

Well the you’ll win win win, huh? Yeah, I love that.

Spencer

But yeah, so like in the, in the old days, the pre pandemic day, or I guess maybe a bit during the pandemic though, during the pandemic it was very much growth mode. Like everybody was just put all your money into it, just go, go, go. Before that you could do pro, there was a lot more project based. We honestly did a lot more project based work because just doing execution, just doing an implementation, just doing email production or creative by itself was fine during the pandemic. Everybody wanted strategy, how could they grow so fast? But then after that all kind of imploded, everybody started coming to us to say, how can I make money on this? 

How can I stay afloat in these hard times? And now luckily I think the economy’s improving, but that mindset hasn’t gone away of like, hey, let’s, like let’s be smart about this, not let’s spend, spend, spend and try to grow as fast as possible. 

Steven

Yeah, definitely A lot more discipline. Yeah, probably. ’cause there’s no free money anymore, right? Like that, that’s certainly is an easy motivator for, for folks. 

Spencer

But that is something we see with our partners as well is that they’re, they’re also going to this motion. So we’re all kind of, we’re all, we’re all connected on, on the fact that everybody, everybody knows that the client needs to make money off of us collectively. I’m gonna move on to the next thing. Just bec just for time, what does this look like? We don’t have to spend too much time on this, but I would, I would, if each of you guys could kind of share your take on what does this look like on the backend? So obviously you’re bringing in a CDP like Segment or an agency partner. 

Like do they talk to each other? Do they work together? Like what does that look like on the backend? How do, how do those two companies, or do they ensure success on the backend?

Pat

Yeah, Spencer, that’s, that’s, that’s a great question. I I think you know it, I mean it varies depending on, certainly on, on the customer. 

One of the things that we’re seeing as an example, more and more, especially at the large enterprise level, is that customers, when they’re looking at a CDP and they’re looking at MarTech at, at modernizing their MarTech stack, they’re running product platform RFPs, but in parallel they’re also running services. RFP and agencies are invited to bid on the services RFP. And then the platform is just, you know, typically separate RFP. What happens oftentimes is once the winners are determined, then the customer will look to get those agencies and the platform players together to then work together, obviously. Right? So, you know, from from our perspective, you know, the, the biggest risk to a customer not bringing in an agency is that they end up learning that, that maybe it’s a, it’s, there’s a lot more to it than they thought because they just simply haven’t been through it. 

So, you know, the the way that we typically like to do it is we, first we ask the customer, is there an agency or an SI that you, that you prefer to work with, that you have a relationship with? If you don’t, we certainly like to see one brought in because it just makes everybody’s life a lot easier if the customer doesn’t bring an agency. And oftentimes our teams are sort of gets stuck with a lot of things that is outside our purview. 

So what, you know, what we’d like to do is if the customer’s agreeable, then we will work closely with the SI even during the sales process to, to create a joint point of view to create those use cases that are meaningful to the customer, potentially even work on proof of concepts together during the sales cycle to prove one or two of these use cases out. And then once we get into, once the customer purchases and we get into implementation and we stay very close, connected at the hip in terms through that process. 

So it’s very much a, a sort of a symbiotic relationship is how we like to work with, with the, with the agencies like Ragnarok

And for us, what we see is the sooner we can work together, the, the more benefit the customer benefit will see and the better the outcome. The, you know, for us, right? For Segment we want to see the customer get to value as soon as possible. Because if they don’t, right, the customers that thought they were going to do this mostly on their own and then are unable to do it, ultimately don’t see the value in the platform. And then that puts us at risk for renewal. These, the way we sell our licenses is at a yearly or, or bi-yearly or every three years. So it’s very, very important for the customer to get that value from the platform so they continue to use the product, right? 

So anything that gets the customer there faster and creates that return on investment then certainly justifies continued spend for our product. 

Steven

That makes sense. Yeah. And I, I think I can add to that as more on the, the sort of backend side of the coordinating that we do. ’cause obviously there’s a lot of like, you know, everybody kind of being under a joint NDA really helps in this, in these scenarios. But to kinda strategize in terms of what we think the, I would say like the approach is, ’cause generally we’re going in together, right? Like it’s, it, it’s often, you know, in your process where you described like sort of a separate SIs and separate platforms like that sometimes happens, but most of the time it feels like it’s more of a package deal where, you know, we’re brought in to support your RFP part of the process or your sort of valuation if you’re bringing us in or if we’re running the evaluation, which we do for some clients, we also coordinate with all of our partners that we’re recommending. 

So everybody sort of has a, we sort of see it as a way of not wasting time essentially. Like we really wanna understand, we really want people to understand across the board of like, what are you evaluating people on? What are they being evaluated on? What are the types of use cases that we wanna activate? What type type of timeline are we looking at? What are some security, what are some data sources essentially to be able to make a strategic and a very technically informed decision around a selection process. ’cause often what we see, especially in buying MarTech, is there’s, if you’re not that experienced with it, everything looks amazing and it sounds great and it’s really hard to distinguish, you know, okay, well how is this, you know, all these platforms moving clean data, great, how, which one is better? 

Which one has a better feature? Is it, which one’s been in the market longer? Which one has, you know, more of an industry match to me? 

How do they approach like these specific use cases? Am I doing is, is it actually all outta the box? Am I doing a lot of kind of custom development within there? And I think I find that like these, like us kind of aligning on that upfront and having like a, like a general approach of how we would solve these use cases, but also to be, you know, a little bit more critical in the process, especially with, with who we’re being evaluated by to help ’em understand like, you know, like depending on who else you’re looking at, like you really wanna understand the nuances of like why this feature from this provider is better comparatively and how you should be looking at that feature. 

And we run a ton of these evaluations for clients, especially as they’re selecting CDPs and other type tools. And we find that when you start to fine tune those features a little bit more and understand like the level of effort that’s required to activate it, it often lends itself to the better tool so to speak, will be the one that shines forth. But not everybody’s perfect for every use case, right? So at least at some point you can get to the point where you say, well this platform’s great with these five features, it’s mediocre with these five and it’s pretty bad with these five, right? But you would have that competency and when you can score that all together, you can say, well this one is adequate for 10 outta 15, but this one’s only ade adequate for eight outta 15. 

And that’s, that’s important to have in your evaluation process ’cause it justifies your selection, right? Ultimately you don’t wanna make a selection decision based on your gut. You know, you wanna make sure it can actually solve the business challenge that you’re trying to do. And I feel like that’s a, a critical part of the alignment. 

Spencer

And on that note, we’ve been talking the talk or you’ve been talking the talk. Can we talk about, I mean we don’t want name any names again, but could you guys talk about a, you, you know, a few case studies at least one where this Segment plus Ragnarok, let’s say SI plus CDP approach has been really beneficial for the customer?

Steven

 Yeah, I think, so. We did something very recently with you guys in the healthcare space and one of the things I think was really useful in that process was, was was being very clear on like how we want it to be evaluated and what we wanted the you to be evaluated on. And so we prepared, we actually wrote the, the RFP in this case in terms of what that would look like to help, help make that process a little bit more streamlined and brought in some other, other vendors as well to kind of help run a more sufficient evaluation process for our client. One thing that we found throughout it was by sort of making it very clear as to exactly what we wanted to accomplish and at what time I think made it a lot more helpful for you to be able to kind of come back and you know, your team did a fantastic job in being able to demonstrate that and being able to, to sort of clarify with sort of all teams jointly about, you know, well how are we gonna do this? 

What is the exact, you know, approach, what is the team requires to do it? What is the, what is the value of it? And to really kind of take, you know, what what could be, you know, use cases as as as sophisticated as, you know, using sort of AI chat bots and things like that to kind of run and have like a decision tree around how that responds to certain inquiries or certain types of, of customers or profiles to things a little bit more simple in terms of, you know, how do I kind of collect and target, we’ll call web abandoners or shopping abandoners for example. 

And I felt like your, your approach to it and, and a lot of this done through alignment was really, really sufficient in terms of like helping to demonstrate that out a little bit more to a, you know, a client who’s, you know, somewhat technical, but this is really new for them. They’re kind of undergoing a digital transformation and just being able to kind of align that level of, you know, of, of like what needed to happen at what stage and, and, and, and how to realize it and what, what, what did the investment in the, in the architecture look like? What was the actual work that was required? I thought that really kind of helped everybody wrap their head around it. 

And when we came down to do the evaluation and, and actually, you know, putting the, the numbers in in terms of like use case competency and things like that, it was really easy to, to have like a, like a rank on, you know, where you sort of stood in certain areas where you could be like, oh, the really, really great here meet, you know, moderate here. And that was, that was really fantastic. And so I think that was really good in terms of having like, you know, like you weren’t shooting in the dark, so to speak in terms of well, you know, are like, where where do we actually stand here? Like everybody kind of had clarity in terms of, you know, we, we know that we can fulfill this area really, really well and this area that we know we’re not as strong in. 

Like how can we, you know, describe an approach that would make us, or make our platform still seem like the solution here. Okay. I I just described this use case that we had specifically around our client is in the healthcare vertical, but there are other verticals that we cover and, and Segment of course is sort of vertical agnostic, but it does have quite a few, you know, depth in, in certain verticals. Maybe you can kind of walk us through a little bit more about like, like some, some folks have trouble kind of understanding like how does the CDP even add value to begin with? What’s the point of even doing this? 

You know, if you were to kind of take us through maybe one of those verticals and, and sort of help us understand or, or like how would you describe the value of Segment, let’s say in, you know, in a vertical? 

Pat

That’s a really great question. You know, to your point, we do go to market very horizontally, not necessarily vertical based. You know, many of our customers, obviously they’re in specific industries and are interested in specific solutions that are relevant to them. And you know, one example that I mentioned earlier was where we had a question from one of our prospect customers in the media space around, you know, can you share with me some real life examples that where Segment has significantly impacted what they were trying to do. So the sales team came to me and, and asked to engage with an agency or integrator that could work with the customer on some, some ideas, you know, rag the rock and, and your team really came back with some very specific things that were immediately of interest the customer. 

So for example, this particular customer is in the media space and the conversation started to revolve around things like audience capture. In other words how do you target specific types of audiences with messaging so that then you can drive more site traffic, more loyalty, and ultimately more revenue from those audiences. And we were able to craft jointly a, you know, a story and a point of view based on actual real life past experience that Ragnarok had with similar type of customers and site specific improvements in things like site traffic, improved inbox deliverability, you know, monetization of newsletters and how to, how to get insight into how that is moving one way or another based on specific marketing activation. 

And so we were able to really kind of get down into the weeds with this customer with use cases and stories that were relevant to them that were immediately of interest, right? In terms. So it was, it, so we took the conversation from, hey here’s, you know, you need a customer data platform ’cause it’s going to broadly improve things to, you know, we have specific use cases of Segment and how it improved A, B, C, and D and here’s some, here’s a real world example of how that worked and how, how Ragnarok was able to work with customers to get to that end state. 

And that’s, that’s very powerful, right? And it’s very relevant and it, and it, and it, and it helps the customer, as we were saying earlier, kind of envision their end state and, and their potential improvement in areas that they’re, that ultimately they’re not buying a CDP ’cause it’s cool, right? ’cause it moves data around they, they need to understand what those specific, very, very specific business outcomes can be and how to get there. 

Spencer

So segwaying into the, the, the why of it again and capping all this off. You know, you, you talked about the end state, Pat, you know, Steven, what do you see with any of the projects we’ve worked on when all this is done correctly? You talked about the process of writing A-C-D-P-R-F-P and the implementation process and you know, how we’ve all worked together, how we worked together with the client. But what is the, you know, are there one or two end states, like successful end states that you’ve seen? Like what were, what were some outcomes of this approach? 

Steven

For sure. Yeah, I think especially since we’ve done almost probably close to a hundred or if not more than a hundred of these Segment implementations over our time, you know, I would say what we, what we see a lot at the end of it is, you know, one, do they actually deploy their use cases, right? And having us on board generally means yes. 

And, and and when they deployed those use cases, did they make incremental dollars off of it? You know, what was the actual incremental revenue? What do they realize? And sometimes that, that incremental revenue is, well we couldn’t do this before. So everything that we got out of this particular program is incremental. You know, we can just simply hold out a control group. And other cases we were able to get more personalized with our customers. We were able to deliver, you know, more timely messages. We were able to do actual real time use cases that we couldn’t really do before. And that, you know, in, in improving the timing that additional personalization, whether on site and specific channels or you know, even sim things as simple as being able to do a suppression list and being able to, to, to not spend on existing customers or people who are about to become customers and paid advertising. 

Like some of those areas, you know, are are are pretty, you strikingly see the results pretty quickly. And I would say generally speaking, like, you know, customers who are doing it right are making, you know, probably at least like 10 x on their Segment investment and their Segment licensing fee investment. If you consider like, you know, total cost of ownership and all that, it’s, it’s not quite exactly a 10 times return, but it’s, it’s a significant return, right? It’s, it’s, it’s definitely paying in spades and, and just by unlocking those features, you get a high return. That’s not even counting the amount of, you know, incremental return. 

You can continue to get because you have more of these capability that now your team can think a little bit more strategically. You could do more personalized things, you can roll it out across more channels. You can, you know, sort of orchestrate this across many different business processes. There’s a lot of kind of incremental potential and over time, like we might see that increase to, you know, 15, 20 times over their initial investment segment just because of their ability to like, do things that they could just couldn’t do before. 

And I’d say that’s like, that’s like the benchmark, right, is if you’re really doing it right and you’re really like focused on, you know, actually getting use cases out the door, deploying them and then measuring them, the, the, the revenue will show up. ’cause generally speaking, segment’s not like doing something you could have already done before. It’s really advancing, you know, a capability that you didn’t really have or something that would’ve cost you a significant investment in technology, internal engineering, maintenance resources, things like that where the payoff just wouldn’t be there. 

Pat

Well, listen, it was, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. You know, we, we love Ragnarok Segment and you know, again, lots of happy customers when we, when we have Ragnarok engaged on Segment implementations and ultimately, you know, the larger MarTech stack is humming along and customers are seeing the benefit of that. So continue to really look forward to working with you guys. 

Steven

Yeah, thanks for coming on, Pat. It was great to have a conversation with you over, over, over Riverside slash Zoom, wherever we wanna call this type of technology video chat. Yeah, just excited for all the things that we have, you know, in the future together and of course continuing to keep our partnership going. It’s coming up on seven years, right? Is 2017, I think when we started with with Segments partnership 

Spencer

2018. 2018. I started at the beginning. Did you, you’re adding numbers man. You’re adding numbers.

Steven

I always add numbers. 

Spencer

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Steven

Oh yeah, Ragnarok! 

Spencer

Alright, thanks guys. 

Pat

Thanks guys. Bye

Spencer

Bye. 

Steven

Bye.