Keep It Human: Salesforce's Leandro Perez on Brand Voice in the AI Age

AI can make you sound like everyone else.

Yes, you can flaunt your uniqueness, burst with fresh ideas, and integrate every shiny new tech toy. But one broad stroke of AI, like autotune in music, can dissolve your brand's identity faster than you can say "algorithm."

So, what can set you apart? 

“Stories,” declares Leandro Perez, Chief Marketing Officer for Salesforce in the Asia-Pacific. It's a simple answer to a complex problem, but one that carries the weight of his 20 years of experience. 

The hackneyed but still influential art of storytelling remains at the heart of brand differentiation. Leandro's approach? Use AI purposefully, weaving it into existing workflows with a "considered, measured approach." From his early days as a software developer to his current role at the helm of marketing efforts across 10 countries, Leandro has always viewed technology as a means to an end, not the end itself.

In our recent conversation, Leandro paints a vivid picture of the marketing world’s AI conundrum, reminds us that AI is still in its infancy, and posits the marketer as the single source of truth for the customer while stressing the importance of local teams in diverse markets. 

This interview is part of G2’s Professional Spotlight series. For more content like this, subscribe to G2 Tea, a newsletter with SaaS-y news and entertainment.

Deep dives with Leandro Perez

Sidharth Yadav: You started as an engineer and transitioned into a marketing role. Could you take us through your professional journey? What were the significant milestones, and how did they shape you as a marketer?

Leandro Perez: My first role as an engineer taught me how technology can address a business problem. In that company, every enhancement was requested by the business. In fact, they paid for the enhancement upon its delivery. 

Next, it was solution engineering or pre-sales. I’d been an engineer for five years. People told me that I had to look for other roles if I wanted to spend more time with customers. Then, this opportunity came up. I used my technical skills to showcase discoverability solutions to enterprise search technologies in the early 2000s. I was working with enterprise search technologies then. 

Then came my product marketing role, which took me to the US. I got this opportunity because I got to know some of our products really well while positioning them to our customers. It was about understanding what the product does, the customer's pain points, and creating messaging assets. 

That experience was an eye-opener for me. Product marketing allowed me to be at the forefront of technology. 

"I realized how you sell technology is just as important as how you position it. It’s not just about what it can do but what people think it can do."

Leandro Perez
CMO, Salesforce, Asia-Pacific

I continued in that role for several years before landing in Salesforce. 

At Salesforce, I helped launch the analytics cloud, rebranded as Einstein today. At that time, the company was pioneering the cloud shift. Later, I was asked to join the corporate messaging team, which I eventually led. It was about determining how to represent Salesforce as a collective—not just one product but everything that Salesforce does. 

At Dreamforce, our largest event in San Francisco, I was responsible for the team that built the keynote. We would later take that keynote around the world.

After experiencing these roles, I could combine them as CMO for Asia-Pacific, which brought me back to my homeland, Australia. 

The Asia Pacific is a diverse market. How do you create synergy across your teams and tailor your strategies to suit the region's cultural uniqueness? 

Salesforce has many operating units. APAC is divided into Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia, India, and Greater China. Independent teams are responsible for these units. 

I don't want to create the same asset in India as I am in Australia from scratch. So, I’ll create it once and localize the last 10% to 15% with the local customer story or nuance. This model empowers local teams, and they implement solutions based on how they see fit.

That then connects to my leadership level, which also includes some pan-APAC roles such as content and field operations. This ensures I get the best of both worlds. 

And then, of course, we're all connected to our headquarters, which creates and disseminates brand guidelines and content pieces segmented by product and industry. 

This creates a pretty good balance. Local empowerment brings us closer to the customer and is advantageous to us because it ensures we are respectful of all cultures. We also ensure our teams represent the communities we serve. So, the Indian team has members from India. 

Get the hottest marketing tea from G2.

Keep up with what’s really going down in marketing with the G2 Tea newsletter. Subscribe here

You’ve led many transformational marketing projects across the world. But could you recall the one you’re most proud of? What did you learn from it? 

We’ve been talking about AI for some time now. At Salesforce, we’ve been working with AI for 10 years now. 

In the past 12-15 months, generative AI has exploded. I had the challenge of ensuring the local market knows that Salesforce is a major player in this space and starting the conversation. 

Many people are defaulting to publicly available generative AI solutions, which are not safe or trusted because they're open to the web. So, we launched a global campaign called “Ask More of AI.”

To drive the conversation in Sydney, our biggest market in Australia, we made up a saloon in the middle of the Darling Harbour. It was called the WAILD West Saloon. Anyone could stop by. It was the kind of bar you’d see in cowboy films. 

But there was a twist. The whole bar had been generated by AI.  It looked like a regular bar from the outside, but the title was misspelled, and one of the doors was out of place. When you walked in, you saw a barman with three arms. The drinks on the menu, designed by AI, had something off about them. We were trying to show in these early stages of AI, you’ve got to ask more questions because AI is still in its infancy. It's still learning.

WAILD West Saloon campaign of Salesforce. Source: Salesforce 

You can’t trust AI entirely without taking the right steps. These include ensuring the data shared is not leaked on the internet and that you know where AI got its data from and what it's leveraging. 

The campaign was a huge success. Thousands of people visited the saloon, and the media covered it, starting a conversation.  

You've stressed the role of CMOs as the customer’s single source of truth. What does this mean for the marketing function? What challenges come with this approach, and how do you overcome them? 

Marketers are growth drivers and creators, but we're the closest to the customer. We push campaigns to the market daily and get real-time signals about a piece of content being looked at, the comments made, and the feedback given. So, we've got the pulse on the customer. 

Historically, marketing has stayed in its swim lane. Marketers use the data captured to launch further campaigns, segment audiences, and so on. 

The change now is about marketers bringing together the whole view of the customer. We’ve done this internally at Salesforce. You track marketing campaigns,  review sales made, service cases raised, and gather product telemetry. This way, marketers can create a single view of the customer. 

This is important because, today, you don’t want to reach out to a customer to sell them something if they've already got an active service case with you. That's a terrible scenario. But as we move into a world where AI will contact customers on behalf of the marketing function, if you don't have the complete view, AI doesn’t have it either. Your customer gets frustrated about not dealing with a human as AI doesn’t understand if they placed an order or requested a service. 

So, I am bullish that the CMO is the best role for this beyond maybe the CEO. However, CMOs must partner with IT, the CIO, and the heads of sales and customer service. The challenge is they’ve all got different aspirations. I don't see any of them wanting to position the customer at the center of everything they do in the way I described. 

A recent G2 survey revealed that AI integration into MarTech is soaring, with 75% of businesses reporting adoption. As a CMO, what's on the top of your mind when it comes to AI? What sets apart businesses that successfully implement AI in marketing?

AI has been around for some time. Many marketers use predictive AI even without knowing about it. For example, our marketing cloud's send time optimization feature lets you send emails at the best time. For some, you’d send them at 10 a.m., for others at 1 p.m. 

To answer the question of who’s having the most success, I'll give you an example of our organization where we implemented AI in the workflow. AI is not a separate tool looking for a separate business scenario. You inject AI into something already being done to make it better, faster, more efficient, or deliver a better ROI. 

When I led the corporate messaging team, our CEO wanted to ensure that our 70,000 employees, after Dreamforce, knew about our latest innovations and could talk via the newest narrative we’ve just released. 

So, I set up a process called corporate certification. My team trained 10 functional leaders on the latest messaging. They trained another 10, who in turn taught others. Eventually, we covered the 70,000 people. As you can imagine, this is not a fast process. 

The new head of the corporate messaging team used Einstein’s AI capabilities in Slack. You’d record yourself on Slack for five minutes pitching the corporate message after reading the material. Then, you’d ask Einstein to rate your presentation. It would come back saying, “Leandro, you've done a great job highlighting this customer story in relation to this new product feature. You forgot to mention a statistic, and maybe your tone was too direct. You probably should make it more friendly.”

We completed what used to take a month in two weeks. The whole company could do it at scale with higher quality. 

"To use AI in marketing, integrate AI with tools people already use so they can see the immediate value."

Leandro Perez
CMO, Salesforce, Asia-Pacific

With the growing use of AI, how can you retain the human touch? How do you balance AI's innovative potential while maintaining an authentic brand voice and personalization?

We don't want a world where every brand sounds the same. If your brand sounds like everyone else's, you might as well be selling the same products off the same shelf.  So, you need to differentiate yourself. 

One of our customers in Australia, Mecca, a cosmetics brand, wanted to enhance its online buying experience beyond the established stores. So they introduced a chatbot called “Miss Mecca.” 

Salesforce trained the chatbot to have the brand tone of Mecca using customer service transcripts of human conversations. You want to call it an AI agent because the old chatbot wasn't smart enough. This reinvented AI agent sounds like a representative of Mecca. The brand could deflect 75% of chats to the agent, which meant humans now had more time to spend with customers. 

Further, there’s always an element of having human customer service agents in the loop. Another brand, Turtle Bay Resorts in Hawaii, wanted a concierge-like experience for customers. The AI concierge could handle almost half the cases quickly, with humans in the loop. They would review what the AI had recommended.

In both examples, the brands thought through the use of AI. They didn’t go with the cheapest, most publicly available tool. It's a considered, measured approach, as with AI in place, if you make mistakes, there can be severe consequences. 

Storytelling has acquired a strategic significance for organizations today. What are the key elements of storytelling in marketing? How can leaders use it to promote their brands or enhance customer experience?

Storytelling is close to my heart. Historically, B2B marketers have been poor in this domain. Merely rattling features to your prospects or customers won’t excite them. 

In the age of AI, you need to differentiate yourself. And a good story can do that. At Salesforce, we do this by sharing examples of how our customers have succeeded, which is one of our core values. So, trust is our number one value because, without it, you can’t do much with cloud computing or have a great relationship with the customer. However, the second value is about customer success. 

 We've done that by creating films of customer stories. We feature customers in our events and love to have them speak and showcase their products. We capture those stories; we celebrate them. Recently, we've gone from not just celebrating stories about brands but also about the individuals who help deliver customer success. We call them trailblazers. We felicitate them on a keynote stage.

A recent G2 survey has pointed to increased marketing technology utilization worldwide. However, certain challenges persist, such as a lack of skilled talent to operate the tools. How can organizations deal with them? 

The marketing field has become more technical. I am lucky because I come from that background. We’ve taken a few approaches for my team. We’ve hired people with that expertise who can use the marketing cloud, data cloud, or our Tableau analytics solution. 

The other track is to ensure everyone is upskilling. We offer Trailhead, a free online learning platform for Salesforce tools and business leadership topics. That's really important. You want people to be self-serve. You don't want a marketer who needs to go to an analyst or IT to understand the ROI for their campaigns. 

You may not be able to hire for all those roles, so you need to reskill your existing workforce continually. You also need a resilient and agile team because their skill sets change and grow. 

What's your vision for the future of marketing, and how do you see your role evolving in the coming years?

I hope CMOs have a permanent seat at the C-suite table. In many organizations, they still don’t. 

Also, AI presents an exciting opportunity. 

"When an organization implements AI at scale, customers end up talking to AI. Soon, customers will have their own AI, so AI will be talking to AI."

Leandro Perez
CMO, Salesforce, Asia-Pacific

With this phenomenon, I think the function best equipped to understand the customer's needs is marketing.

So, I implore all marketers to ensure this technology is not left to other departments and teams alone. Marketers must take up this challenge.

Lastly, I don’t see any change in CEOs asking for ROI for everything from software to investments. It’s essential to brush up on your data analysis skills so you can talk to a CFO and defend where your money is going. 

At Salesforce, we have the privilege of working with some amazing brands, and I get the opportunity to share their stories. APAC is among our fastest-growing regions, and leading teams here presents a big opportunity. 

I've not come the traditional way into marketing. I'm excited to be at a growing company like Salesforce, where we have many new products.

Did you know marketing technology buyers valued integrations the most while eying new tools? Learn more about trends from our latest report.

Follow Leandro Perez on LinkedIn to learn more about AI-driven marketing.