- One of the pieces that I think is a real magical
part of B2B marketing is, it's not B2B it's B2B to C.
So when we're selling to Kellogg or Reckitt or Estee Lauder,
we're really selling to George or Danielle or Jay,
not to think of them as numbers or leads in a funnel,
but individuals and I think the team
has a lot of fun doing that.
- Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin and welcome to Connections
where we hear from some of the most innovative leaders
in marketing.
Gail Moody-Byrd is the CMO of Noodle.ai,
but that is just her title, she is so much more than that.
Her story starts in steel town, Ohio,
weaves through Atlanta and Manhattan,
and continues right here in the Port of Oakland,
where believe it or not some of Gail's work at Noodle.ai
can be seen firsthand.
Gail, welcome to the Connections.
- Thank you so much for having me,
I'm so excited to talk you.
- You grew up in steel town, Ohio.
- I did.
- Tell me about your upbringing.
- Interesting story, so when I think of myself,
I think of myself as a product of the African diaspora
and the great migration.
So as you know, the great migration
happened in the early 19th century, 20th century,
where people, African-Americans,
moved from the South to the North.
So all four of my grandparents
moved from Mississippi and Georgia,
to the industrial Northeast and that was really
for better jobs, more opportunity, more economic progress.
It was an environment where we were very aware
of that history.
There's a real sense of the black excellence,
of high expectations.
I attended a historically black college,
my parents attended historically black colleges,
and now my son is going to do the same thing.
And there was always sort of a responsibility
to do well, to do better, to move through this economy,
and find with each generation more and more opportunities.
- You got your education at Spelman, what was that like?
- So Spelman College in Atlanta was an amazing opportunity.
Spike Lee was in my class at Morehouse,
Martin Luther King III, Marty Kiar was also in my class,
there's just a sense of possibility
that the world was our oyster.
And so while I was there, I majored in economics,
but because of this sort of,
this interesting yearning that I developed that always knew,
that I was gonna do something bigger and better different.
- A college internship took you to Manhattan,
how was that a game changer for you?
- Historically black colleges
are known to be a great source of talent,
and so lots of corporations from New York,
other major cities come to the colleges for recruiting,
so I was lucky enough to snab an internship,
and it was with Chase Manhattan Bank.
Never been to New York, we had a chance
to meet David Rockefeller actually
and I've got a great picture of all of us standing with him.
So, because we were there for the summer,
we had a chance to talk not only about
opportunities in banking, but what it was like
to attend an Ivy League business school to get an MBA.
And so I found that during that summer, met lots of people
and ended up applying to a bunch of business schools,
but most notably Harvard Business School,
which I was able to attend after that.
- It sounds like they were lucky to have you,
what was that experience like?
- There's sort of this sense of, like I was in a class
with people whose last names were Cabot Lodge,
and so generation after generation,
- [Sarah] Wow.
- Of people who had attended Harvard,
who had that as their expectation and sort of
were already prepared to have this intergenerational wealth.
That's what was new for me, was to understand that
this is the way this capitalist society works,
and that there are opportunities
not only to work in businesses, but to own them.
- So speaking of opportunities you started in retail, right?
- I did.
- So what was that opportunity like?
- When I was a kid, one of the favorite things
that I did with my mom was to go shopping,
and actually one of my earliest mentors or role models
was a woman who was a black woman
who was a buyer at a local department store.
So sort of come full circle, go to Harvard Business School,
find out that I really love retail
and I wanna do that for my career so I leave,
do an apprenticeship in retail at Bloomingdale's
and then I moved to McKinsey and become a retail consultant.
And so that's when I sort of understood the importance
to be really, really focused on serving customers.
- You were at SAP for a long time, serving customers there,
share with us that experience.
- I was the product marketing person
for the SAP Community Network, and I got to know
not only what it was like to sell our products,
but what it was like to use our products.
And so that really put me on a path
to diving into social media, to community,
developing relationships,
a lot like the trailblazer community
that you've actually developed, but we did it there at SAP
and it was something we were really passionate about,
but we also learned how to be authentic.
We were on the cusp of cloud, social, mobile,
all of those things, and that's kind of a
superior trait of my career,
of working early in technologies
and helping to build businesses.
- It sounds like you're always on the frontier,
how important is that to you
to be on the frontier of things?
- Well, you know, work is kind of boring
if things that aren't challenging.
So one of my first jobs in technology,
was working with Palm Computing.
It really was, showing people a technology
that they didn't know they needed,
so lots of marketing challenges there.
Move to SAP was on the forefront
of a couple of different technologies
and now at Noodle.ai, my God, the people that we talked to
who are now really seeing the benefits
of using artificial intelligence to run their supply chains,
problem they didn't know they had,
solution they didn't know existed, and a technology
that is very mysterious and very misunderstood.
And so what I love is the challenge of figuring out,
how do you take something that's very complex and unknown,
breaking it down by working with your product people
to understand what it does,
what the customer pain points are,
and then how you solve those pain points,
using this technology.
- Tell us more about Noodle.ai and their mission.
- We're an enterprise software company.
When you think about it in its simplest terms,
we just happen to sell a product that's called AI.
There's just a lot of demonization of AI today.
A lot of people who misunderstand it,
who think it's the evil empire,
but it really is, it's better math.
- So you're just such a natural marketer.
Right now you said this AI which is, people think is complex
and all these words like algorithms and things,
and you just said it's better math.
How is that to be a marketer,
to explain such complicated concepts
in ways that your mother could understand?
- We think about it in terms of customer examples.
So one of our customers, for example,
makes breakfast cereal.
So when people say, what do you do for a living?
We make sure that the size and the packaging
of the breakfast cereal that you're looking for tomorrow,
is there on the shelves.
And the way we do that, is by anticipating your needs.
By understanding your behavioral patterns in the past,
where you shop, what you do,
we take all of those things into consideration,
and we make sure that that's on the shelves.
We did that for the company that produces Lysol,
making sure through the pandemic
that all of those household goods were on the shelves.
We do that for cosmetics companies.
Imagine the shifts in demand for cosmetics
through the pandemic, of completely shutting down,
people moving to eCommerce, not going outside at all.
Understanding all of those shifts, and then making sure
that what it is you're looking for is available,
is really all that we do.
- I need some AI to run my house,
coz I don't have all the things in my home.
- I'm happy to do that.
- Always trying to find locations
that are relevant to our guest and today,
we chose the Port of Oakland because much of your work
at Noodle.ai deals with shipping and supply flow.
What is so fascinating to you,
about the global supply chain?
- Because of the pandemic,
something that people really took for granted,
supply chains have been operating, ports have been open,
but nobody really noticed until it became completely
just sort of unpredictable.
It's what we call a black swan event,
it's one of those once in a lifetime events that occurs,
and so suddenly people wanted to understand,
how do my goods move from place to place?
What is it that makes sure that
the things that I'm looking for are available,
especially as people are starting to do things like
not eat out anymore, but he eat at home.
What does that mean, what does pantry loading mean?
How does a company like Kellogg's, or a company like Reckitt
anticipate the needs of what's gonna be desired?
So supply chain suddenly became so topical,
that I think you remember in the Suez Canal
when one of the ships
was turned, - Oh, got sideways.
- [Gail] got sideways and was blocking the canal and that-
- You couldn't get lumber, and so we couldn't do building.
- Yes, right, right.
Well, that also meant that a lot of food
didn't get to the right place, so suddenly,
everyone shifted to try to understand supply chains.
So our mission in life, is to use artificial intelligence
for manufacturing and supply chain companies
to create a world without waste.
- And what advice do you have for marketers
that are trying to explain their products
as so eloquently, as you do?
- Get to know your product management
and your product marketing people.
They are the secrets to understanding what the product does,
in such an intimate way
that after they've explained it to you
using all of that complexity,
they'll eventually get to a place,
especially with great dialogue of,
and this is why it matters.
We know at Noodle that we're doing something really special.
We can transform the way supply chains operate,
we can eliminate waste, we can eliminate
all of the wasted human capital that there is in the world
of people waiting for machines to start again,
people dealing with quality rejects,
work can be much more satisfying.
So when we think of our business,
we think of something called flow operations.
It's really transformative.
It's about creating a new category
of artificial intelligence,
and so every day we talk about not only the grind
of the work that we have to do to get leads
and put them in Salesforce and move them through the funnel,
but the people that we're helping.
So one of the pieces that I think is a real magical
part of B2B marketing, that doesn't get discussed much is,
it's not B2B, it's B2B to C.
So when we're selling to Kellogg or Reckitt or Estee Lauder,
we're really selling to George or Danielle or Jay,
and we're developing relationships with them.
So I also instill in my team,
getting to know the people that we're selling to,
not to think of them as numbers or leads in a funnel,
but individuals who are being motivated
to think about what it is we do to try our product
and to move from prospect to customers,
and I think the team has a lot of fun doing that.
- What's your experience been like in corporate America?
- You know, it's all about representation.
I know that a lot of the people that I work with,
aren't really accustomed to seeing black women
in leadership roles.
My numbers are a little more carefully watched,
and I know that.
The kind of scrutiny that I'm talking about
would be things like having an opinion in a meeting.
Now that opinion coming from me could be characterized as,
oh my God, there she is being the angry black woman,
where if it came from a white male might be,
my God, he's taking charge,
he really has an opinion, we love that.
And so, being able to internalize and handle
that double standard, realize where it's coming from
and understanding that my response
to that kind of activity is so important.
So how do I keep myself grounded
and make sure that my response is the right response,
and one that I feel proud of,
is something that I think about every day.
- If you were to talk to your grandparents,
what would they say about all of your accomplishments?
- So my grandparents would say,
congratulations, you've done great, but you know what?
We expected nothing less.
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We'll see you next time.