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Leading Braze Expert Interview with Stitch CEO Michael Burton

Braze Expert Michael Burton

Interview: Braze Expert with Stitch CEO – Michael Burton

This article was updated on December 10, 2025 with an up-to-date FAQ section.

In this MarTech expert interview, SalesWings Co-founder and CEO, Philip Schweizer talks with MarTech leader and Braze expert, Michael Burton, who has started up Stitch, a 100% Braze focused consultancy, after years with Salesforce and ExactTarget.

Brands aligning with Braze, a leading Customer Engagement Platform, are not only breaking down traditional marketing silos but are also unlocking possibilities in seamless customer interactions. Now, what does the expert say?

Watch or read the interview to learn more about:

    • Why Michael built Stitch, a 100% Braze focused consultancy
    • Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Braze
    • AI & innovation in marketing engagement platforms
    • The power of the composable MarTech stack
    • Completing Braze with Alloys partners (like SalesWings)

Join us as we explore Braze innovation, leadership, entrepreneurship, and the quest for marketing efficiency in the age of Braze-powered strategies!

About Michael Burton, Stitch Co-founder & CEO

Michael Burton is an entrepreneur with a passion for building and scaling professional services businesses. He has over two decades of experience in the industry and has held recent leadership positions at ExactTarget, Salesforce, and Lev.

In 2016, Michael joined Lev and quickly grew the company into the top global Salesforce consultancy for marketers. In less than four years, he took the company to a high eight-figure enterprise valuation through a successful acquisition by global strategic integrator, Cognizant.

Michael is now the CEO and co-founder of Stitch, a Braze consulting partner. Stitch is a rapidly growing company that is helping brands of all sizes engage their customers through Braze.

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Tired of video? Read the transcript!

Philip:

Hello everyone, and hello Michael! How are you doing?

Michael:

I’m doing well. Good to see you again.

Philip:

This is another SalesWings Expert Interview from our Expert Interview series from MarTech Leaders, and Braze experts in the ecosystem.

So, Michael, I believe the first time we met in person was at Dreamforce. We were sitting outside of the LinkedIn office, and it was all about Salesforce. It was all about Dreamforce at the time. And since then, you were CEO at Lev.

At the time I would say was probably one of the, if not the, most influential Salesforce marketing focused agency out there. And you have sold this later on to Cognizant, and today you have co-founded Stitch. Let’s say you’ve almost switched sides a little bit.

Tell us a bit about what happened between there and today.

Michael:

I’m surprised that you remember exactly where we were located. Can we first start there? That’s a great memory. I remember we were outside in San Francisco. It must have been like September, if I recall, September of 2019. But a great memory.

My background over the last decade, and has been spent in marketing Tech. My entire career has been in Professional Services, but it’s been the last 10 years where it’s been marketing tech, and that journey started when my wife told me I’d be crazy not to take this job offer from Exact Target years ago inside their services business.

So that was kind of my entry point into marketing tech, and that’s how I got focused into Salesforce marketing cloud and acquisition by Salesforce happened in 2013 of ExactTarget.

It was an interesting kind of an interesting moment because Exact Target didn’t really lean into a partner ecosystem, definitely not like Salesforce does. Salesforce does a tremendous job of that, and so I saw an opportunity.

Ultimately, after a few years at Salesforce, I said, I know I want to go do this outside of a tech company. I’ve always been Services embedded in a tech company. This was the first time to branch out. That was Lev, to go do that.

You’re right. I did not start as the founder or CEO of Lev. Which I can talk about later about why that led to me doing Stitch. I kind of thought Lev would be interesting, because it was an existing business, not huge, maybe 20 people, and it’d be a great platform to go build this Salesforce marketing cloud business, and that’s what we did.

We kind of reinvented what Lev was and turned it into truly one of the most influential self-serve Marketing Cloud consultancies in the world, competing with the biggest GSIs and agency holding companies out there.

It was an awesome journey, and I learned a whole lot. We did exit out to Cognizant in March of 2020. It’s about six months, from the moment that we first met to when we exited the business to Cognizant in an awesome journey, which kind of brought up stuff to 2022.

Philip:

Yes. I remember when Exact Target was acquired by Salesforce. We were a part customer, and we had onboarded to Part. I believe three months in, they were acquired by Exact Target, and then Exact Target was acquired by Salesforce. So definitely part of the MarTech history. A great start.

So you co-founded Stitch now with Bobby. What are some of the dynamics in the market, whether it’s the marketing technology landscape or how buyers engage with customers or buyers. What are some of these dynamics that have influenced you or your thinking on your decision to go and cofound Stitch and obviously also the new regards to that new focus towards tech?

Michael:

So I break it down into three buckets when I think about, like what are the personal motivations for starting Stitch along with Bobby who was the first to join me at Lev. He was originally a part of my Exact Target team. He went to Marketo and I convinced him to come back over to this world together from Marketo. So there’s kind of these personal reasons why we decided to do Stitch.

Second thing is like why is Braze a good opportunity for a services business? Then there’s the product side of Braze and where they’re going.

Why personally? I think Bobby would echo the similar sentiments, I wanted to see what would it be like to truly start a business from scratch. My theory about Lev was to go and use an existing business as a platform and kind of reinvent it and move it in another direction. But you know I never started something from scratch.

My original theory was it would be easier to start with an existing platform and I was wrong.

This, like Stitch, has actually been easier than what it was at Lev. Not easy, but easier. So there was like this part of us that wanted to say, can we go do this on our own and have similar success and learn from a lot of things that we did at Lev that work well and what didn’t work well. But there’s kind of like the personal thing about why we decided to go do this.

Why Braze? A Few Good Reasons.

If you think about Braze, why Braze from a partner perspective, like why would this make sense? Even listen to the earnings call last week with Braze, they talk about their partners, so very early when they talk about the consulting partner ecosystem, like the maturity, but I thought there’s significant opportunity here for a few reasons;

> The product is outstanding.

> The leadership team is really quite incredible. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Bill Magnuson, truly is one of the smartest people I’ve ever interacted with. At the same time, quite humble and grounded and sometimes not always appearing that way. Like you’re taking a company public. You build a great story, incredibly intelligent and still very humble and open. I love that.

> Then there’s the market dynamics that we saw.

> We saw that Braze has a small percentage of their actual revenue that comes from internal services. It’s about 4 and a half% and that’s been steadily declining. I would argue that they probably could have invested in that in actual internal services or redeployed it to other ways, to help some of their customers. They’ve chosen a kind of path that they have. Which I saw as an opportunity.

> They moved into a lot more Enterprise spaces and at that time they had an immature partner ecosystem.

So, all those dynamics, we’ve had experience doing this as a channel partner. We want to go do this and a lot of market conditions are right for us to go do this.

So those are all the kinds of motivation that said we should go in, we should lean in hard to Braze.

But it also wasn’t like we immediately jumped into Braze. We looked at Twilio for a little bit. But we ultimately said, Braze is where we’re going to lean into hard and heavy and that’s how we got to this point.

 

Philip:

This makes a lot of sense. With SalesWings, our product which complements Braze with essential B2B lead scoring capability. We have chosen Braze as well as one of our key partners. I can echo pretty much everything you’ve said.

I met Bill very briefly at a Saastr event where he was giving a talk. I was truly impressed by his vision and also where they came from; you know Appboy almost defining or being part of the definition of mobile marketing and how they evolved.

It was interesting because he was talking about how they were struggling to get some of the attention from particular VCs and were mostly bootstrap for a long time. Then how they have turned into this Omni Channel Engagement Platform. That still benefits probably from a lot of the mobile marketing focus at the time, so very exciting space for sure.

Now Stitch, you know you call yourself a fully-integrated consultancy and you have you know several parts of that you have implementation, you have data integration and strategy and then program services.

So there are a lot of agencies out there, but what sets Stitch apart? Tell us a little bit about Stitch.

Michael:

At our core we are a consultancy. So we are here to help customers get the most out of Braze. And we do say Braze is the cornerstone. I use that phrase and terminology quite a bit. Meaning we don’t do anything competitive with Braze.

But unlike our prior experience at Lev, Braze is one component. It is not a CRM component and there is not a service component. So it’s a marketing platform. And so our story with Stitch has been we’re all in on Braze and we truly are. That is the foundation to what we do, but it also opens us up to do more work in complementary solutions.

Whether that’s on the data side with Snowflake or Databricks, on the reporting side with tools like Mixpanel or you think about like Movable Ink kind of mixing in the picture, Phrasee etc. So we’re taking a lot of these solutions and putting together more efficient solutions that are way more effective than what we’ve seen from legacy marketing Cloud.

So that’s what we’re leaning heavily into and then we are working very closely with Braze on helping to win net new logos for them. Which become net new logos for us and I think that having that focus on Braze allows us to do that.

If we were like a technical agency or consultancy where we’re doing Salesforce, Adobe, Braze, Iterable, Clavio etc, how are you going to trust me to co-sell with you?

I’m going to have a strong point of view on why I think Braze works for the segments of business that we go after. I think that’s helped differentiate us from having that experience in doing this before. Understanding how to co-sell with a partner. How to help an existing Braze customer get more out of their platform and then we become an extension in a lot of ways to our customers that we bring on.

So yes, it’s about implementation. But we really love helping with kind of ongoing services and also how we can help set up a better solution for you that requires less of our time and less internal team members moving forward. You have a higher return on your overall marketing investment.

So that those are the areas that we’re touching but I do think like the focus and experience that we have has given us a strategic advantage over many other players.

Philip:

I think consultancy is definitely the better word than the agency. It’s interesting that the partner ecosystem was probably somewhat immature.

When you started to decide to go into Stitch, where sales has been excelling and both on the technology partner side, the Braze Alloys Partners and on the solutions side we see development. That’s what becomes a part of what Braze success is. This triangle of external Braze experts that excel, not only at Braze, and can compose the MarTech stack with other solutions, that you’ve mentioned such as the Braze Alloy Partner ecosystem.

Now so you’ve changed to some extent the sides here from Marketing Cloud to Braze, though they’re not the same tools right.

I would say a typical Marketing Cloud customer is not necessarily the best fit for Braze and vice versa. It depends on many different things. What hasn’t changed is that you’re at Lev and Stitch you have a strong focus on making marketers successful in their technology strategy and in general, marketing strategy.

Now what would you say sets a Braze customer apart? How is a Braze customer organization possibly unique? Also the marketer running the tech stack, you talk often about this concept of the modern marketer. So how does that fit together with Braze?

Michael:

I think the early adopters of Braze in the post the Appboy brand, are ones that were a little more technical. This is kind of like the initial wave I’m talking about. I’ll come back to like the following waves that we’re seeing in the initial wave, where marketers were more technical marketers, that were more interdisciplinary.

Meaning like they weren’t just thinking about this from where I live, in my email silo or in my paid media silo or where I live in my mobile push. Which is what we see in a lot of Enterprise level brands that we run into becomes even more complicated when we’re think about how does B2B fit into the picture, B2B, B2B2C and so forth.

So you have some of those early adopters who recognize hey this is a platform that allows me to think about being able to do marketing across all those channels today because I can.

We think about where Salesforce Marketing Cloud is. It’s not great with mobile and it is not great with SMS. It is primarily an email channel. But that’s what it primarily does the best and it’s a bunch of acquired companies to form together a solution. It’s not one solution that’s been built organically over time.

So an early adopter of Braze said, ‘hey I see this as an advantage’. I think some people wrongly say well Braze was just doing mobile. Actually back in the beta product it was doing mobile and email. In fact it was doing email before Iterable was even born. And so it’s been a part of the product since the very beginning. But it’s that kind of across multiple channels, so that was the first wave.

And then the second wave is now seeing, and this was happening before I was at Lev. Where customers were saying hey we’ve heard this.

I won’t just pick on Salesforce. I think Adobe is the same way. We saw this with the Oracle and Cheetah and Amerisis, where everyone is saying this is a great platform and it’s really not a platform. It’s a lot of acquired products over time.

And customers are being charged a premium for it and the prices are increasing again this year. They’re saying hey my utilization of this platform has gone down. Innovation is slowing. That’s kind of the second wave of migrations from large Marketing clouds are what we’re seeing now with Braze.

So that’s kind of the different dynamics of the audiences that have been using Braze over time. I do think that they will continue to do a great job of moving customers off of legacy marketing clouds and being very competitive with the Iterables of the world.

Philip:

One thing I noticed as we started to immerse ourselves into the Braze ecosystem, is that it felt like the different teams within the marketing tech organization are working more closely together.

So one example is you know data teams working more collaboratively with digital and the digital marketer. Another benefit you know probably that’s linked this is the better usability of Braze.

There’s a faster learning curve, but you mentioned that you know what is out there today. Then over time there’s innovations coming out and marketers need to learn that, they need to adapt to what’s coming.

I read a recent report the Chief MarTech Report 2024, and he was talking about how the sentiment of organization over the last three years, has grown in so that they actually under utilize tools.

Here I see a strategic advantage for Braze customers as well is that they get a platform which is expandable. Which is not only technically expandable but which is expandable in reality as well right in practice.

Michael:

You are spot on. The Braze messaging has been very much ‘we’ll meet you where you are today. But we’re going to support your growth’. So if you want to come in as an SMB customer in one channel you can do that and continue to grow.

If you want to be an Enterprise level customer who wants to come in from Salesforce and consolidate everything into Braze, across multi channel, you can do that as well.

Because you’re spot on, I think that they positioned themselves in that way. They’re not always strong in sending their message. Salesforce does a way better job of broadcasting their message. But the message they have is real. I hope that Braze becomes a little more inspirational. A little bit more production in their marketing message.

I think that will benefit all of us Stitch, SalesWings, and others. As they continue to capture more market share but in general what their message is, that is what we see happening in reality with customers migrating to Braze.

Turn lead and account intent into pipeline

See how SalesWings helps sales, marketing and AI teams spot real intent and decide the next-best action for every lead and account.

What has fueled the trend of the unbundling of tech?

Philip:

The success that Braze drives for Braze customers, definitely gets spread through word of mouth. I’m also looking forward to Braze being a bit more self-confident. There’s so much to it that may not be evident right. You can say it’s often conceived as, or has been conceived, to be more mobile marketing focused but today they’re providing offerings across channels.

I regularly look at some of the content you guys put out there. Stitch has a great resource hub on the website and in one of your recent articles, you mention this trend of the great unbundling of the MarTech stack. What that means is that you have your core platform and then you have best in breed solutions complementing that.

So what is the key success factor for that to work? And what do you feel what has fueled this trend of this unbundling of tech at this time?

Michael:

At first we definitely where thinking about this movement. Juan Mendoza who does the MarTech weekly wrote a very detailed analysis of think about unbundling. I always recommend people check him out. I’m a big advocate of his content.

But we saw this happening too and and where customers are saying. I think it starts with what you said.

We’ve seen it in the Gartner reports. This the feeling of utilization of the MarTech stack has gone dramatically down. In 2021 they thought they were using 50 percentage, in 2022 it was in the 40’s and now I think it’s in the 30s. Everyone’s saying, ‘why are we paying for a lot here but we’re not really getting a ton of value?’ So you have that happening. You can argue with the percentages because it’s more of a feeling. But it’s definitely happening. You have macro conditions that we are forced to say, ‘hey we’ve got less budget’.

I think that was a big kind of initial push to say what’s going on really. What are we getting out of our MarTech stack?

That opened peoples minds to say, hey let’s be more thoughtful. Do we really need the CDP? Do we really need sales Marketing Cloud? Like if we’re just using this one component for email, we’re still using Airship in the mix.

There was this push to say how do we know we are really getting a lot out of our main platform. Let’s look at other ways to think about pulling together point solutions, because we’re already doing a little bit of that but still relying heavily on these big legacy players. I think those were big drivers behind this.

I don’t like talking about AI and machine learning because let’s just talk about innovation. What’s happening? Yes it’s really about innovation but I think some of the other players too that were more like a Braze, had an advantage in that space of being way more innovative. So I think all those things were kind of in the mix.

Seeing this movement now on the other side we also are seeing it in brands talking about this. While you see some of that movement, you also see customers consolidating. So you don’t just see them consolidating on platforms like Braze.

We see both of those trends happening.

It’ll be interesting to see what wins out in the end. I think it’s always something in the middle that will become the reality moving forward. But you do see customers saying, ‘hey like we’re using Salesforce for email, we’ve got Twilio for SMS, we have another solution for mobile, why don’t we move it all into Braze.

So you see Braze kind of benefiting from that movement as as well.

So I’m paying close attention to what will happen. I think a lot of this is theory right now and we need more data to see how this plays out over the next few years.

Philip:

Yeah I’m very excited about this general trend. As you know there’s this growing term composable tech stack and I think what it means for marketers is specifically for Braze in our context.

SalesWings complementing Braze with the B2B capabilities is that the core platform is very important. Here you have Braze, which is primarily a consumer focused marketing platform but by composing that stack with best of breed solutions. You create a very flexible approach to building your stack over time.

Organizations are encouraged to do micro innovations as we call them and ourselves, but also other players, are heavily investing into this interoperability of different tools. These integrations, these API connections, must be out of the box whenever possible.

So let’s talk about AI.

Michael:

Before we go there. I think that’s an important point.

I’ve done some Salesforce bashing a little, but to that point we talk about Braze, like you already have a Salesforce investment. Sales and service are incredible products. Continue to do that, like Braze doesn’t solve that problem.

But what Braze does, is a better solution than Salesforce marketing Cloud.

We plug Braze into Sales and Service cloud in the exact same ways that sales marketing cloud is plugged into sales and service. Then you layer in SalesWings solution and then you a have a way better experience. It has better outcomes. It’s likely more cost efficient and I think that’s an excellent point to call out.

Philip:

You mentioned the G2 Crowd Report which also was quite insightful for me. You have the core of a marketing engagement platform. You have things like data management, you have subscriber management, segmentation, you have different channels.

Some of these features that you would find invest in breed solutions, so in our case this is lead profiling and qualification sales insights all these things. G2 found that when they’re available at the core so built into an all-in-one platform they’re actually generally rated quite low by customers.

So customers do want and here we’re talking you know tens of thousands of reviews right so it’s representative. I think this trend makes total sense to compliment Braze or others with these best in breed tools.

Michael:

It requires know-how. Like how do you know what solutions are even out there? How do you pull them together? A lot of the brands that we work with don’t necessarily have that. They’re they’re stuck just driving their day-to-day job which they have high expectations to drive outcomes.

Back to the earlier question about what’s driving Stitch’s success. like clearly is one. We want to stay close to what’s happening and come back and say Here’s what you should be doing.

This is how it’s going to work and I think that’s where consultancies play an important role.

Philip:

Yeah absolutely. So the AI Trend. So AI is it’s been such a crazy year. I remember end of last year. When I heard for the first time about Chat GPT. I tried it out and was immediately amazed. You could literally ask it a great question. You could ask it to write a song and so on.

So SalesWings was one of the first sales enablement solutions to build an integration and a sales assistant with chat GPT. We actually beat Salesforce to Market by two days. Which I’m still very happy about and as we started to engage customers there was this kind of wave of emotions coming from the market.

It was at first this incredible excitement, which then sort of turned into fear of the unknow with AI and what’s going to happen with the data.

Today companies and customers are sort of in between fear of being the first and then fear of being the last. It’s literally hard even for experts to stay up to date with what’s coming here, but from your perspective, where are we headed with all this AI developments?

Michael:

So I mean it is it is real. I think about this but people are still are very hesitant right now. You’re right there’s initial excitement. Somehow some of these models have almost regressed in some ways.

I was actually working on Bard yesterday. That’s kind of primarily what I use. I was doing some research and saying I was asking questions about Accenture acquisitions of Salesforce consultancies. It called out this one that said it was acquired in 2021. I knew that’s not right. It was just acquired about three weeks ago. It came back and said, yes you are correct, that was my mistake. I started asking questions like, why did you say it was in 2021 if you knew it was your mistake?

So I think that is a general concern. There’s also a concern about if we’re all using the same models. Then we all in the end look exactly the same. Which that cannot happen. How do we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace?

People are trying to understand how does AI run against my own data. In addition to leveraging solutions like open AI. So that feels very early and customers struggle today just pulling their regular data together into one view.

Let alone thinking about it how are they going to run AI against their own data.

I do think that’s where Data Bricks is really well situated for the future. I think Snowflake will be there too. I think it’s still very early.

When we think about how does AI help? where do we get the most excited about where AI will help marketers?

I think it’s evitable that a solution like Braze, is less on content and images and what’s the right subject line? I don’t think those move the needle a little bit. But probably not as what the future really is going to hold.

Where we can very much imagine a world where a platform, like Braze, completely eliminates the concept of what was a content calendar. Many Brands set up a content calendar where we send out men’s shoes on this day. This is how it works. This is when we do women’s apparel. That happens, all the time now. I think that whole world is completely disrupted.

Where it’s saying, I’m looking at your data. I’m looking at industry data. Here is what the campaign should be running. Not only that, we have this concept of when we send out a marketing campaign; we send out and people think of it as I’m sending out an email campaign.

I envision a world where AI is saying we’re optimizing to every single individual. Maybe Philip prefers a mobile push. Maybe Michael prefers an email and Michael prefers this type of content. And email at this time of day with this type of subject line, this type of imagery. That’s what is one campaign.

The world is not far away. I think that’s where AI will really disrupt marketing and marketing tech. And make it way more efficient, more effective.

I was talking to someone this week a little off track, but I think it’s relevant. We have this concept of A/B testing. We’re always trying to optimize for things like what’s going to drive the most revenue. This message is being received by this greater number of audiences, so that’s what we should push out. What about the other people, that want the other message?

So we should actually be optimizing for everyone. I think that AI will allow us to be more effective at optimizing for everyone, to drive the best experience for them.

So that’s where we think AI and the marketing world will have the biggest disruption. How are you actually running marketing campaigns? What are the operations? How many people actually needed?

We’ve actually been playing with this concept of Stitch almost over time becomes your anti-agency. Because we’re setting this up to run for you. You don’t need as many marketing people on your team; you don’t need big agencies to help you.

We’re going to be the ones that are going to help set it up for you. So that’s what we’re thinking right now.

Philip:

Interesting thoughts. There were several interesting aspects there. I think generally we can say it’s early days. It’s exciting just to think about it. I think we’ll watch this interview in a year and it’s going to be interesting to see what has materialized.

It feels that both AI and the users are in their infancy. Probably when you ask AI the question and then asked it to verify you made that model better.

I can’t remember off the top of my head whether it’s IBM or Facebook. They built this chess computer that would literally train itself with 40,000 chess games to become a chess master. So that’s one part of AI getting smarter. There’s generative AI, where you can generate content subject lines and other things.

I agree with you that the analytics part will become a lot more powerful. Being able to connect your own first party data to Open AI or other LMs. Taking conclusions from that. I think that’s a big challenge.

How is AI going to make the right conclusions? I see a potential risk there. That marketers are going to adopt immature AI applications too early. Which maybe leading to wrong decisions. Hence again the need for consultancies like you guys who can test things and iterate on things.

Being active in the Braze ecosystem, I think they’re definitely ahead there as well on the AI side. So maybe in a year you and I are going to be talking fully virtual so who knows.

So last but not least. You have been successful with Lev. You have doubled in size this year in a challenging year. I would say for the global economy if you could go back and you meet Michael when he’s you know say 20 years old 25 years old, what would be the sort of advice you would give him?

Some of the insights you know whether key success factors in your professional and personal life, that you wish you would have known?

Michael:

I love being a CEO. I did not really have a dream of being a CEO. I think I had this vision of what a CEO a leader of a company, was back to my early career. I talk about this and I write about this, sometimes I talk on different podcast. I wish people would have shared this with me.

There is not one type of CEO. You don’t have to be this extrovert like I can be this introvert and leader and still be very successful, and I wish I would have had more of that understanding way earlier in my career. I think it would have led me to maybe I don’t maybe I’d be on my fourth or fifth company by this point who knows. But I wish I would have had that thinking and understanding.

I think the other thing is this idea of you have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. Lev put me in some very uncomfortable positions to do things I never thought I could do. I was never asked to do. Like being focused on how do you do channel marketing. How do you build relationships with channel sales. I’m I talk people about putting yourself into uncomfortable situations in your career to advance you faster and faster.

I think the third thing is that the most successful companies are the ones that their brand and their culture are very much intertwined with each other. They cannot be separate like your people have to have a strong connection point into your brand. They live together and so that’s something I’ve adopted regularly about brand is culture and culture as brand.

I think those are the three things I wish I would have had more insight into and thought earlier in my career. But I have no regrets. I love where I am. I love how I got there. But those are the things I kind of educate others on, that have an interest or want to have the same path of becoming a CEO or being a leader of a company.

Philip:

Great that’s a great final thought and we’re all work in progress. Over time, we learn. Thanks so much, Michael for an interesting conversation.

Stitch is a fantastic Braze consultancy which we recommend. SalesWings B2B Braze Alloy partner, making Braze the unstoppable B2B market engagement platform.

Turn lead and account intent into pipeline

See how SalesWings helps sales, marketing and AI teams spot real intent and decide the next-best action for every lead and account.

Conclusion

In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern marketing, the distinction between B2B and B2C strategies is becoming increasingly nuanced. The convergence of digital customer experiences through omni-channel marketing has spurred a significant change, and at the forefront of this transformation are businesses leveraging the cutting-edge solutions offered by Braze, a leader and pioneer in the Customer Engagement platform space.

Thank you for reading this comprehensive and insightful discussion covering various aspects of marketing technology, AI, and leadership.

If you have any more questions or if there’s anything else I can help you with, feel free to let me know. Thank you Michael, have a fantastic day.

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Should I migrate from my legacy marketing cloud to Braze today?

Yes. If you need faster cross-channel execution and cleaner data activation, migrating to Braze can unlock materially better customer engagement outcomes.

Many suites suffer from channel silos and slow iteration cycles, while Braze centralizes journey orchestration and real-time triggers across email, mobile, and in-app. For VPs, the near-term wins typically come from consolidating journeys, reducing tool overlap, and standardizing experimentation. Start with a scoped pilot (one lifecycle stage, two priority channels), define success metrics, and build your migration roadmap from those learnings.

Tip: pressure-test vendor claims by running a side-by-side nurture for 30 days before committing.

 

What helpful tips can you share if I’m migrating from Marketo or HubSpot?

Inventory every journey, audience, and integration, then migrate in waves by lifecycle stage with strict parity tests before deprecating legacy systems.

Freeze net-new workflows in your old tool, map objects and IDs to the future state, and rebuild only what drives outcomes; don’t copy technical debt. Stand up bi-directional CRM syncs early, verify consent states, and rehearse failovers. For enterprise stack changes, appoint an “experience steward” who signs off on CX parity before go-live.

Tip: leverage proven playbooks for Marketo/HubSpot transitions to Braze to reduce risk and downtime.

 

Does Braze customer engagement fit for B2B?

It does; pair Braze with B2B lead scoring and sales insights to personalize journeys and handoffs across longer, multi-stakeholder buying cycles.

While Braze excels in cross-channel engagement, B2B programs benefit from account and intent signals to prioritize outreach, trigger sales actions, and tailor content by role and stage. Enrich Braze audiences with firmographic and behavioral scoring, then align journeys with CRM stages to avoid “over-nurturing” active deals. Adopt an “account + contact” view when designing segments and alerts so SDRs see context, not just clicks.

Tip: accelerate proof of value by piloting scoring-driven alerts to sales on one ICP segment.

 

What else should I include in my stack alongside Braze?

Anchor on Braze for orchestration, then compose best-in-breed data, content, and analytics tools that solve specific gaps without recreating a monolith.

Typical blueprints pair a cloud data warehouse or lakehouse (for identity and models), reverse-ETL (for audience syncs), Braze for journey execution, and modular add-ons such as dynamic content, experimentation, and product analytics. The goal is interchangeable components governed by clear contracts (events, IDs, SLAs) so you can swap tools without re-architecting journeys. Define a reference architecture and a change-control process to keep sprawl in check.

Tip: formalize “integration SLOs” so channels degrade gracefully if an upstream feed lags.

 

How can I measure Braze’s impact on customer engagement ROI?

Tie ROI to incremental revenue and retention by channel and journey, not vanity metrics like opens or send volume.

Establish a baseline for key flows (onboarding, activation, expansion, win-back), then run holdouts or geo-splits to quantify lift. Attribute at the person-level using consistent IDs and define “assist” logic for multi-touch journeys. Track operational ROI too: reduced time-to-launch, fewer tools, and lower data-engineering burden. Roll results into a quarterly “engagement P&L” that the CFO and CRO understand.

Tip: publish a simple dashboard mapping each Braze program to a single North Star metric per lifecycle stage.

 

How should different teams and departments align when using Braze?

Create a shared engagement schema and operating cadence where data, product, and marketing own the pipeline together.

Start with a canonical event and profile dictionary (who, what, when), a documented identity strategy (IDs and resolution rules), and SLAs for freshness. Product defines events, data engineers ensure reliability, and marketers declare use-cases, not tables. Review backlog weekly: one new event, one journey improvement, one experiment. This tight loop builds trust and prevents “data debt” from stalling campaigns.

Tip: maintain a living “Braze readiness” checklist for every new event before it can power a campaign.

 

How can I realistically use AI with Braze customer engagement today?

Use AI to scale personalization and decisioning, but ground it in high-quality events, clear guardrails, and rigorous testing.

Practical wins include send-time optimization, content variants, predictive audiences, and anomaly alerts that prevent “over-messaging.” The biggest unlock comes from combining first-party data with AI-driven triggers that adapt by individual, not average. Establish human-in-the-loop review, run holdouts for each AI feature, and document failure modes (e.g., data drift, bias). Prioritize automation that reduces manual ops before expanding to generative content.

Tip: pilot one AI capability per quarter, with a pre-approved rollback plan and measurement framework.

 

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