Expert Insights – Content Supply Chain with Corre Kombol

Transcript

Well, hello, I’m Cynthia Boone, your On-Demand Workfront CSM, and welcome to Expert Insights. This time we’re talking about content supply chain with my very good friend, Cori Commbaugh. When I say very good friend, she actually is my friend. Yes, it is a little self-serving, but I’m going to have a conversation with my friend that you just get to listen to. Cori, welcome to Expert Insights. How are you? Life is better when you get to work with friends, and it just makes it so much sweeter. It does. We work hard, but we get to have a lot of fun and a lot of laughs. Tell us about yourself.

Goodness. Well, my name is Cori Commbaugh, as you mentioned.

I’m a Customer Success Manager here at Adobe. I’ve been here for about three-and-a-half years. I’ve worked in customer success for over 15. I’ve worked primarily with retail customers, financial service customers, healthcare customers. I love working with customers. It’s my favorite part of my job. Personally about me, let’s see, I live in Seattle.

It’s rainy almost all the time, except summers are beautiful. I’m a runner, I try to be. It’s gotten slower over the years, and I have 11-year-old twins It happens. You also have a delightful. Sometimes I get to see your special guest star Pearl.

Your new cat. Yes. Here’s the thing about Cori. I know that you-all don’t know her yet, but you’re about to.

She does love working with customers. I know you’re like, oh, every CSM says that, and I’m sure that they do, but here’s what I know about Cori.

She gets into the details. She gets into the weeds with customers. This is important because we’re about to talk about content supply chain. She’s so strategic. I’m hoping I’m not making you blush, but I have seen you in action with your customers, and you get to know everything that they need from beginning to end. I think that’s a perfect segue into what we’re talking about today. So because I, those that know me, I don’t speak marketing. I speak IT and operations. When we talk about content supply chain, what does that entail, and what does that mean? Sure, it’s a buzzword or a buzzphrase that is being used a lot these days, but how we see content supply chain is really bringing together people, tools, workflows to create, plan, produce, deliver, measure content. So it’s about an end-to-end creative supply of content. And I think how Adobe really looks at it is how we can increase speed, scale, ROI of content.

Amazing. So I’m gonna ask the question. I know I mentioned how you are so close with your customers, but how did you become, and for the record, you are our expert. Like there’s a reason that I’m talking to you, not just because I’m talking to you. How did you become the expert with your customers? Sure, well, I think I’m lucky. I get to work with some of Adobe’s largest customers, and that includes Deloitte, Elevent’s Health, Pfizer, that I’ve had an opportunity to work with and really learn from them. They’re smart, they’re creative, they’re using Adobe solutions to really elevate their content supply chain. And it’s been really impactful seeing what they have done. So it really comes from my customer work. Amazing. So kind of walk me through it. Like where does it start? What does that look like? And then in terms of like how do things flow? So if you’re asking about content supply chain, you have to think about where does work start? So work usually starts in planning, and then it goes to creative production. Then it goes to some form of asset management and delivery. And then we all wanna measure, especially in marketing, how well content performs. And so you have to think about it almost like campaign management, but a much larger scale. Amazing. So in terms of, I know this isn’t necessarily about work front, but I’m assuming that from a work front standpoint, that’s where planning lives. Yeah. And then as it moves through approvals and this content sort of lives in a place, then we’re talking about AEM and that. And then from that backend measurement of how did this particular asset work? And then I think you also can bring in our creative tools at Adobe, like InDesign, Photoshop, even talking about reviews, frame is a huge part of that. And so it depends on the customer’s use cases and what they’re trying to do. But yes, it typically starts with work front and how you’re building a brief and how you’re starting that production of the work that needs to be done. I mean, personally, everything starts with work front. That’s what I heard. I’m just kidding.

And ends. And ends. And ends.

So I know that this is a topic that everyone asks you and continues to ask you, especially because this is very top of mind for a lot of companies. So what do your customers ask you all the time in terms of content supply chain? I think that they asked me, how do we get started? That’s the biggest question. Where do we start? And I always say, we start with where your pain points are. Where are you trying to gain efficiencies? And so we start having conversations about, is this about time? Is this about money? Is this about your teams working more efficiently and being happier at their jobs because they don’t have to touch 10 different tools to do one thing. It really starts with what the customers are trying to do better at. Okay. And it’s all about process. I can see that. Like it’s not always technology, is it? Yeah, exactly. So what, and I may have just led you into your answer, but like, what do you wish that they would ask you more often in terms of getting started with content supply chain? I think I wish they’d asked me like, what’s the best way to get started, right? Instead of trying to do everything at once, where is the first opportunity to get started and going from there? Of course, there are some large enterprise customers that can take on a massive amount of transformation, but oftentimes customers are squeezed and they can only do things in phases or stages. And so it’s really a question of, start with your pain point. Let’s figure out the best way to approach it and then go from there. Really not to overwhelm the process or the system that you’re trying to make better. That makes a lot of sense.

And I like the idea of efficiencies, right? Because you’re having to do a lot more sometimes with maybe a lot less.

And it feels like this process with all these tools together could save a lot of time and provide consistency, right? Yeah, I think so. And I think that’s actually where Gen AI comes in. We haven’t really mentioned that at all, but that comes in because anything that’s machine learning or automation is going to help you deliver content faster and more efficiently. And so I think that part of this, and it’s just one part of it, is how that automation can fit into making sure that your content supply chain runs as smoothly as possible. And so that is something we haven’t talked a lot about, but it is part of this whole conversation that’s going on across the globe with customers. Really, how can we use the content supply chain that we have today and have it be smarter and better and faster for our content needs? So in terms of, I mean, I know we just had summit and I do have some questions in regards to that.

Like what resources, if I was just trying to get started, because I think, I know that you talked about big customers, but you don’t have to be a big customer, right? No, definitely not.

And so getting started, you’re just working those processes. So what would be your favorite resources? Do you have some favorite resources? Sure. Yeah, and so I’ll mention a few resources that are just available to the public, and then maybe I’ll talk a little bit about Adobe and Teams that could help you as well. And so the first thing I’d say is business.adobian.com, I think it’s a great resource. They have information about content supply chain, and you could read all about that. They have a whole section on it that really goes over in a much better way than we’re doing today, exactly how Adobe looks at customers’ content supply chains. It actually, within business.adobian.com, there’s great product demos, one on Workfront, where you can really get in and see how the tool works. That’s a great place to start to better understand Adobe’s technologies.

Once you do, I recommend you reaching out to your contacts at Adobe and seeing if you can have a personalized demo of what you’re looking to learn more about. I also always recommend that customers try to find other customers that they can connect with that are on the similar journey, because I think us in technology, we talk the same talk. Our customers are all trying to achieve similar gains, and if they can start having connections saying, hey, I went down this path and it was really, really beneficial, or I’m really struggling with how we use this technology, you can, there’s a huge community of Adobe customers. There’s a wonderful community of Workfront customers that you have helped curate that can really lean on each other. And so I know that was long-winded, but in short, many places to go. Start with first learning a little bit more about the technology that’s available today. And I do love the idea that you mentioned about like sort of, well, two things that you said, one, connecting with other customers is really important. But, and I just wanna reiterate something that you said earlier, and that’s that idea of using the technology, but to solve those pain points. Like I think as a former SysAdmin, I know you hear this a lot, that the technology itself can be overwhelming. And that’s why I wanted to talk to you about this particular topic, right? This is a very large conversation, content supply chain. And in order to be successful at it, I just hope everyone takes your advice with start with your pain point and solve to that. Like what is, where is the sort of chink in the process, right, that it’s not working. And I just love that idea. Okay, so I know that we’re coming close to end of time. So I ask this question of everyone, and this is, this I feel like is so relevant, because how do you know that you’re ready for this? How do you know that you’re ready for change in terms of this technology and this approach? Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, we each work so hard every single day. And so I think that we see customers are ready for change when they see something that’s broken, when they see that they can do better, be better every single day. And I think that’s why technology exists, to help us get to that next stage. And so I think when you, you know you’re ready, when you know that what you’re currently doing could be done better. And so I love that you said that, and here’s how we’re gonna end, because you did mention that you’re a runner, and not everyone also knows that you’re a pacer. I also, for the record, am a runner, air quotes. It’s very slow, but pacers are really important. So for those of you that don’t know, the pacer sets the pace and sets the example. You see that pacer and you’re like, I can do this. And I feel like that to me is you in a nutshell, Corey, you all, you show us how we can be better and where we can be and where we can go. And I’m so grateful that you took the time out to have this conversation, cause this is gonna be a big discussion the rest of this year, next year. And I’m so grateful for you. Thank you. I loved being here and I’m always happy to help. Thank you so much. Thanks for everyone that took the time to watch us. All of the things that Corey mentioned in resources will be a part of this post.

And we’ll see you next time on Expert Insights. Take care, everybody. Bye.