Demo the Customer Journey Designer like a rock star

https://youtu.be/RjkzQv5KtlA

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When I started to think about how I wanted to demo the Journey Designer, I kept coming back to the word “journey.” It is, admittedly, an overused word in MarTech these days used by all the major Marketing automation vendors to describe multi-step, multi-channel customer interactions. How could I differentiate? The word “journey” led me to the band Journey which led me to their most popular song: “Don’t Stop Believin.'” A song so popular that my wife and I had a violin trio play it as the Recessional in our wedding ceremony. As I sang the first verse in my head, the lyrics set themselves up much like a Customer Journey: 

Just a small town girl
Livin’ in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere
Just a city boy
Born and raised in South Detroit
He took the midnight train goin’ anywhere

A small town girl could be part of a segment! The Midnight Train could be an event! City boys is another segment! Let’s start draggin’-and-droppin’ and see where we’re at! I try not to overuse exclamation points but this was exciting!

A singer in a smokey room
The smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on, and on, and on

This one is a bit tougher, but after listening to the song dozens of times in front of the Designer, I stumbled upon the out-of-the-box Customer Voice template for “Periodic customer feedback.” By making a few simple tweaks to that template –swapping out the header image and text, changing the first Likert scale answer from Stars to Smileys, and adding some Branching logic, I had something. And I thought I was done. 

Strangers, waitin’
Up and down the boulevard
Their shadows
Searchin’ in the night
Streetlights, people
Livin’ just to find emotion
Hidin’ somewhere in the night

“Strangers” sounds like a new segment of contacts we have but maybe have never done business with, so let’s show off the Swimlane functionality! Let’s drop in a Wait tile. Let’s send them an email where we can A|B test some imagery and copy to get us through the verse. But now we’re just beating a dead horse, no? 

Workin’ hard to get my fill
Everybody wants a thrill
Payin’ anything to roll the dice
Just one more time
Some will win
Some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on, and on, and on

At this point, we are literally filling up the canvas. “Everybody” sounds like another segment. We haven’t shown off Marketing Forms or Pages yet, so let’s create a page where “Everybody” can pay something to roll some dice! The Split tile is a perfect fit to randomly select some winners, losers, and those born to sing the blues! And since we haven’t yet shown Teams Live integration in Marketing, let’s make Sing the Blues a virtual streaming event that never ends! 

Marketing Features Covered

I know this all sounds like a stretch, but if you watch the entire demo, you’ll see that we’re covering a lot of ground, and if you set it up right, it can all be new ground to the prospect such that none of it is a waste of time. Here are the features of the Journey Designer you can show off with this storyline: 

In other words, you can show off most of the Marketing suite through the course of this Journey without ever leaving the journey. The only major feature areas you may want to cover before or after are Dashboards/Reporting, Lead Scoring, Real-time Marketing, and LinkedIn integration. I’ll share how I incorporate those features into my demo as soon as I figure it out myself.

When to use this

This is a generic demo (mostly), yet I am a firm believer in customizing demos. How do I reconcile the two? There are a few things we can do to show the prospect that we listened to their needs while still using the Journey Journey™ as the bulk of our demo.

1. Start by showing them how you would create a Marketing Email using one of the prospect’s templates. This is a good way to start because we’re starting very simple. Show off the Email Editor, show them Personalization. Insert a Content Snippet. Show them the Spam and Accessibility checkers. The Journey Journey™ doesn’t spend a lot of time in the Email Editor so this is a great place to do it while showing content specific to their business.
2. Or, you can do the same by introducing them to a simple Customer Journey since a Journey can include a Marketing Email. The advantage to starting with a Journey is you can simultaneously introduce them to Segments. Go through the steps of creating a Segment inspired by their business. Follow all the steps above for a customized Marketing Email relevant to their business. Now, when you start the Journey Journey™, they’ve already seen some of the Journey Designer so it won’t all be brand new to them.
3. Remember above when I listed the parts of Marketing not covered in the Journey Journey™? Use those spots to customize the demo to the prospect. The Lead Scoring model you show should be inspired by information they shared during the Discovery call. Your Real-time Marketing example can be customized to their business (I prefer to show RTM after Outbound Marketing).

In other words, there’s plenty you can do to demonstrate you understand their business before and after the Journey Journey™.

I should also mention I wouldn’t use the Journey Journey™ for a demo less than an hour. Depending on how fast you move through it, and prospect interaction, this can take 20-45 minutes. If you have any presentation you want to give upfront, or time for Q&A and feedback at the end, one hour just isn’t enough time to do anything but the the Journey Journey™ so I would do something else. If, however, you have 90 minutes or more, you have breathing room to show other aspects of Marketing and allow proper time for feedback and Q&A.

Isn’t this a long time to spend in the Customer Journey Designer?

Does 45 minutes seem excessive just to show the Customer Journey Designer? Yes and no. Yes, it sounds excessive, but it’s not. Companies looking for “Marketing Automation” mostly mean digital marketing. It’s safe to say 75-90% of what they want out of a solution like Dynamics Marketing is related to outbound email. Sure, they have Events that they’re already doing, and they may or may not be interested in the Dynamics Event Planning features. They may or may not be disappointed in the Social Media features in Dynamics Marketing; if they are disappointed because, say, they’re a B2C company doing a lot through social media, then they probably already have a tool they’re using for that anyways, and that tool doesn’t do outbound email which is why they’re looking at us. They might be doing SMS marketing already, but it’s likely dwarfed by email. They might want direct mail hooks that we need to be prepared to discuss, also subordinate to outbound email. They also likely have an outbound email provider today, so the reason they’re looking for something new is because they have outgrown their current tool, and need something more robust. Whether you do the Journey Journey™ or not, the topic of your demo that should get the most airtime is the various feature sets of outbound email: segments, marketing emails, journeys, analytics.

And again, while the Journey Journey™ takes place primarily in the Customer Journey Designer, as I listed in the table above, you are showing a lot of other aspects of the Marketing solution like Marketing Pages, Marketing Forms, virtual and in-person events, Customer Voice, and on and on and on and on (pun intended).

Pro Tips

• Practice this a lot before you do it live because there are nuances around the Back button potentially erasing tiles you’ve added if you’re not saving it as you go.
• I think it shows better when you build it out from scratch for maximum surprise, but you could work from a Journey that’s already built out. You will save some time by going the pre-built route, but it’s not much since all the components (Segments, Events, Emails, Pages, etc.) will need to exist already and be live in order to be used. 
• One spot where pre-built vs. from-scratch might save you a minute or two is in the Customer Voice survey. I keep two of them Live so I can use whichever one I think is appropriate for the demo — one that is the out-of-the-box “Periodic customer feedback” survey, and one that is already customized with the image, text, smiley, and branching logic. Customizing the survey only takes 2-3 minutes tops, so I believe it’s worth the time to give them a taste for Customer Voice which they may not have realized they need until they see it, and I want them to see how easy it is to use. Just note that in the OOB survey, you need to have either already uploaded the image of the singer in the smoky room, or make sure it’s accessible when you need it. 
• The more time you spend filling in the details of the events, the more sense it will make to use this as your primary Marketing story. For example, for the Midnight Train event, I make it a Recurring event so I can mention that’s possible, I’ve added Custom Registration fields for Meal Selection, Seat Preference, and COVID-19 vaccination. I’ve registered Contacts for it. Internal Team Members. An Event Image in case I need to show it on the Portal even though it’s not part of the script. I use the Midnight Train event as an introduction to Event Marketing in Dynamics so that I can show a different set of features for the Sing the Blues Teams Live event at the end where I’ve set up multiple Passes (General Admission, VIP Pass), Sessions, and Sponsorships. It’s a solid hour or two of prep time, but once it’s done, you have an entertaining Marketing demo ready to give on a moment’s notice.

Instructions

Out of fear of turning this into a 10,000 word blog post, I’ve put instructions here.

Extra Credit

If you’ve spent the bulk of your Marketing demo in “the Journey journey” as I do, it’s worth taking about 15 minutes to create a bunch of other fake journeys based on 80s hits so that, if you end up at the Journey list page, there’ll be some funny stuff for people to read. I created a personal view that gives plenty of the room for the journey name, and exposes Purpose next to the name so I could tie each famous song to a business issue. NOTE: none of these journeys work; they’re purely decorative. And if you’re reading them aloud, you’re ruining the joke. When I finish building the Journey journey, I Save & Close what we built to end up on in my default list view and if there are no questions, we’ll keep moving. If there are questions, though, everyone else is reading the screen and taking in the joke.

The Inevitable Objection

Just mention the following facts: 

• “Don’t Stop Believin'” is the #1 Spotify download amongst all 20th century songs. Sure, Taylor Swift or Kanye may have more downloads for their 21st century music, but “Don’t Stop Believin'” tops every song made from 1900-1999. Rolling Stone magazine just put it at #133 in their updated top-500-songs-of-all-time list.
• While “kids” may have been born after its release in 1981, it was featured multiple times in Glee, Scrubs, Famliy Guy, Adam Sandler’s The Wedding Singer, Broadway’s Rock of Ages, and of course in the most dramatic ending to the series finale of The Sopranos. 
• Sports fans born after 1981 may recognize it from the White Sox World Series championship in 2005, or the San Francisco Giants championships in 2010, 2012, and 2014.  
• Or just have them read the first paragraph of this NPR story about a karoake night in a college town in 2019.
• Finally, refer them to Commandment #2 that not every joke needs to be for everyone. The VAST majority of people will get the reference so don’t worry about the miniscule minority that won’t.