Latest / Sales Pipeline Radio / Governance Isn't the Enemy of Speed, It's the Foundation of Trust

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Governance Isn't the Enemy of Speed, It's the Foundation of Trust · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt Heinz: All right, we are back live from Boston recording Sales
• 0:20
  Pipeline Radio episodes here at the Webflow Conference at the Omni Hotel.
• 0:24
  Very excited.
• 0:25
  And just thank you to Dave, to Alice and the team for allowing us to do this.
• 0:28
  It's been very fun.
• 0:29
  We have our own podcast recording booth.
• 0:31
  It's a little bit of a hot box, but it does have AC, which is kinda nice.
• 0:35
  So excited to be here recording.
• 0:37
  We've been able to pull some really interesting people off of the show
• 0:40
  floor, some Webflow customers, some CMOs.
• 0:43
  Have with us for this episode the Chief Innovation Officer
• 0:46
  at OneTrust, Blake Brannon.
• 0:47
  Blake, how you doing?
• 0:48
  Blake Brannon: Doing great, Matt.
• 0:49
  How are you?
• 0:50
  Matt Heinz: I'm good.
• 0:51
  We don't see people here that have been at the company for 10 years.
• 0:54
  You've been at OneTrust for a long time, and recently became
• 0:59
  Chief Innovation Officer.
• 1:01
  When you're Chief Product Officer, people kinda know what that means,
• 1:03
  Chief Marketing Officer maybe, but what is a chief innovation officer?
• 1:08
  Blake Brannon: Well, the background of it is, like you said, to put
• 1:11
  the framing of it — think of it as a chief product officer.
• 1:14
  But one of the challenges you have in a company, especially in what's
• 1:17
  happened with AI in the past — let's call it two years — is how are you
• 1:21
  gonna disrupt yourself, and how do you have an organizational structure
• 1:26
  where you have enough head space and capacity to spend most of your
• 1:29
  waking hours not firefighting, but actually first-principles thinking
• 1:33
  about, if we rebuilt the company today, what would that look like?
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  So we carved myself and my team out to focus on that charter,
• 1:40
  and that's what we've been up to.
• 1:42
  Matt Heinz: I love that.
• 1:43
  We're gonna talk a lot today on this episode about — for those of you listening
• 1:46
  that are sales and marketing leaders — it's gonna be your favorite topic.
• 1:48
  It is governance.
• 1:51
  When people hear governance, they sort of shrink back a little bit.
• 1:55
  But let me give an example.
• 1:56
  If you're in marketing, the idea of consent is a sticky wicket.
• 2:01
  If you need to get consent for a quote, consent for a recording,
• 2:04
  it becomes a very big issue.
• 2:07
  Was it last year that OneTrust processed two billion consent transactions daily?
• 2:14
  Blake Brannon: That's — yes, probably a stat from last year.
• 2:16
  It's more than that now.
• 2:17
  I don't even know the latest number off the top of my head, but it's
• 2:21
  billions of transactions every day across all of our customers and
• 2:24
  all the digital properties, mobile applications, streaming TV services.
• 2:28
  So you have smart TVs that are all effectively sources to gather your
• 2:33
  personal information, and there's some interaction of, do we have consent to
• 2:37
  use that data for who we're sharing it with and what we're doing with it?
• 2:40
  Matt Heinz: So I think the reason why we shrink away, as go-to-market leaders,
• 2:43
  to governance is because we think about the antiquated process, right?
• 2:47
  It is a document that we have to go read and understand, that has to be
• 2:50
  manually followed, that feels like it gets in our way of doing things.
• 2:54
  But it also creates consistency and repeatability and predictability
• 2:57
  of outcomes if it's done right.
• 2:59
  So you think about the things that are supercharged and work to our
• 3:03
  benefit in the age of AI, I feel like governance is on that revolutionary path.
• 3:07
  Blake Brannon: Well, I think the right mindset — you're absolutely
• 3:09
  right — is it's almost like a marketer's worst nightmare when the
• 3:13
  legal team in the company comes to you and says, "We have this compliance
• 3:16
  obligation. We need this stuff on our website," and it sort of breaks
• 3:20
  what you're trying to achieve and do.
• 3:21
  And for things like consent on the web, what that really meant was you used to
• 3:26
  not have to ask permission to do anything.
• 3:29
  The default was just on, and you could do whatever you want.
• 3:32
  And this was, like, the first thing in the world that sort of said, "Well, wait,
• 3:35
  you need to at least get permission before you start doing certain things." And
• 3:39
  that's different in different parts of the world of how aggressive that funnel is.
• 3:44
  The mindset, though, to actually think about this is if you think about where
• 3:48
  marketing's going, where data's going, where AI's going — the most precious
• 3:52
  resource you can have as an organization today is unique data that you can do
• 3:58
  something of value with that nobody else in the world can replicate.
• 4:02
  And when you take that perspective and you think about how are we gonna
• 4:05
  get data that's unique for us, you go on a journey of figuring out how
• 4:10
  are you gonna have a first-party relationship with your prospects and
• 4:13
  customers, and how are you going to get very unique proprietary first-party
• 4:19
  data and be allowed to do really unique AI innovative things with it.
• 4:24
  And to do that, fundamentally, you've gotta have the trust of those customers,
• 4:29
  of those prospects, to say, "What you're telling me you can provide and do is
• 4:35
  gonna require this personal data from me, and I authorize you to do that
• 4:40
  with it." And if you build that trust, what you actually find is that, and
• 4:44
  you give the choice and controls, you have people actually be more open and
• 4:48
  willing to do things with you, right?
• 4:50
  We probably all personally experience this with maybe even some products we
• 4:54
  use in our consumer life, where there's certain apps or companies that you just
• 4:59
  have a little bit more inherent of a trust with, so you're more comfortable
• 5:03
  with saving your passwords in their cloud, for saving your photos in their
• 5:07
  cloud, for allowing your personal emails and things to be used by them because
• 5:12
  you have a trust associated with it.
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  And those built — started with one service, they built services on top of
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  that, that allowed those companies to effectively build an ecosystem from that
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  basic principle of trust for all kinds of other data services and data products they
• 5:29
  could provide, but it was built on that.
• 5:31
  Matt Heinz: I'm glad you bring up trust, 'cause I think
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  trust is a key part of this.
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  Like, if there's governance in place and that we all agree
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  that it's the right checks and balances, then governance works.
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  If we put governance in the hands of AI agents, that actually sounds really
• 5:44
  exciting, 'cause the speed of governance can actually work in our, to our benefit.
• 5:49
  Talk about trust of the systems.
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  And I feel like we're still in this — I mean, it's getting better every day,
• 5:55
  but we're still at a place where I don't think we fully trust the
• 5:57
  systems the way we would trust humans.
• 6:00
  Where are we on that path, and when do you think we're gonna pass
• 6:03
  the inflection point where we're gonna so benefit from all of this?
• 6:06
  Blake Brannon: I think it's coming at — if you think about, what's the
• 6:08
  fundamental reason people hate governance?
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  Like, boil it down to what's the main thing.
• 6:13
  It's not because they don't wanna be trusted.
• 6:16
  They don't wanna have the data customers give them to be protected and secured.
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  The reason they hate it is because it's slow.
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  It slows them down.
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  That's the fundamental thing.
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  So how do you solve that?
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  You speed it up.
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  So the simple thing you've gotta solve is, let's speed it up so marketers aren't
• 6:35
  waiting on governing and risk teams to kinda decide things or constantly saying
• 6:39
  no, or we have to analyze these things.
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  If we can have the governing process speed — move at the speed
• 6:45
  that agents are moving, right?
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  Building agents, building sites, coming up with new products to use the data
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  for, for new AI innovation — if we can accelerate governance to move at that same
• 6:55
  speed, it removes the main reason people don't like governance to begin with.
• 7:00
  Matt Heinz: Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Chief Innovation
• 7:03
  Officer at OneTrust, Blake Brannon.
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  He is a Georgia Tech alum, Georgia Tech 40 Under 40.
• 7:09
  Have you driven or ridden on the Ramblin' Wreck?
• 7:12
  Yes or no?
• 7:14
  Blake Brannon: I have sat in it, drove, like, on a football field on
• 7:18
  it, but never down a road or anything.
• 7:20
  Matt Heinz: You've driven on the football field in it?
• 7:21
  Blake Brannon: Yeah, like rode on the back of it.
• 7:23
  Matt Heinz: Okay, so for those that don't know — and we're getting inside
• 7:26
  baseball now, but I'm a college football nerd — please describe to
• 7:28
  people what the Ramblin' Wreck is.
• 7:29
  Blake Brannon: So the Ramblin' Wreck is this old car, and I
• 7:32
  forget the exact year it is.
• 7:33
  I wish — you know, I should be sharp on these things.
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  But it's an old Ford car, and it is basically almost like a mascot is a
• 7:41
  way to think of it for the school.
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  So every football game and every great event, they'll have the Ramblin' Wreck,
• 7:47
  which is this car, sitting outside of it.
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  They'll drive it down the street or onto the football field as
• 7:52
  they kind of welcome everyone in.
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  And a lot of times, the actual mascot, the Yellow Jacket, is sitting there,
• 7:58
  buzz on the back of it, and jumps off and does flips and things like that.
• 8:02
  Matt Heinz: So it's always safer to ask a college football question when someone
• 8:05
  went to school in the South, right?
• 8:08
  You can't do this — I'm born and raised on the West Coast.
• 8:10
  I'm a University of Washington alum.
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  You can't assume that every Washington alum understands, like, this
• 8:15
  Blake Brannon: whole—
• 8:15
  —understands college football
• 8:16
  Matt Heinz: in the South, well, knows the tradition.
• 8:17
  No, no, or just knows the traditions, right?
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  Like, even though Washington football — but if you're from the SEC,
• 8:22
  if you're from the South, you know.
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  It's just part of the deal.
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  Like, if someone went to Auburn, you're like, "Have you personally TP'd the
• 8:29
  tree outside of Toomer's?" They know exactly what you're talking about.
• 8:32
  Yes.
• 8:32
  Exactly.
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  As do you, because you're from the South as well.
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  One of the other things I found interesting about you,
• 8:37
  you are a prolific inventor.
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  Like, you have over 20 patents, specifically on OneTrust.
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  How do you do that?
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  Like, what does that process look like?
• 8:47
  Blake Brannon: You're missing a zero there.
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  It's over 200.
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  Matt Heinz: Oh my gosh.
• 8:49
  Blake Brannon: So, but the process is really simple.
• 8:52
  Like, you just have to think first-principle of, like, what
• 8:58
  needs to be invented to solve something of value for someone.
• 9:01
  And if you have this knack — which I went to Georgia Tech as an
• 9:05
  engineer, that's, you know, a great engineering school — but I have this
• 9:08
  engineering background and discipline.
• 9:10
  So you're just very savvy at thinking about solutions for these things.
• 9:14
  And of course, you come up with great solutions, and you're like, "Hey, we
• 9:19
  should protect this IP," so you patent it.
• 9:22
  So as part of my career, in multiple companies I've done, we've built
• 9:26
  really innovative ways to get secure data on mobile devices when iPhones
• 9:30
  were first coming out, and how do you get enterprise apps securely
• 9:33
  there and be able to remove the data?
• 9:35
  At OneTrust, everything from how do you access or request your
• 9:41
  privacy rights as an individual.
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  Most people don't realize this, I'll share briefly, but you have the human right.
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  Like, your privacy is rooted in human rights is where this comes from.
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  And your personal data is almost something you should think
• 9:53
  of as your personal property.
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  Just like you own a house or something, it's like your property.
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  So when you have given your data to someone, you actually have a right
• 10:02
  to tell them to delete it, right?
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  Or to give them a copy of it.
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  And you can do this with, like, your favorite coffee company, your
• 10:08
  favorite retailer, your favorite, like, cloud technology company.
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  Go send them a request.
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  It's typically called a subject rights request in the US.
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  Some people in Europe call it a data subject rights request.
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  But it's really fascinating.
• 10:18
  You get, like, a report back that says, "Here's every cappuccino you ever
• 10:22
  ordered, shot of syrup, two pumps of coconut." I'm like, "That was, you know,
• 10:26
  an employee or someone, a colleague's order, no doubt, 'cause that's not
• 10:30
  me." But it's really fascinating to kind of almost have a reality check of
• 10:34
  what information companies have about you, and are you comfortable with that
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  being out there and being used for things that are out of your control?
• 10:41
  Matt Heinz: Well, and we're right back to governance, right?
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  So I think not only in terms of, like, my right as a consumer to that
• 10:46
  information, but I think if I go and tell a company, "I don't wanna hear
• 10:49
  from you anymore, and I want you to delete this information," for too many
• 10:52
  companies, that's like a, "Oh, crap.
• 10:53
  Well, I got 16 different systems that have it in 14 different places,
• 10:57
  and it's a manual process that Jeff in IT has to go and do — and Jeff's
• 11:01
  on vacation this week." Oh, boy.
• 11:02
  So this becomes — I mean, and this is no longer a nice-to-have.
• 11:06
  Like, you can lose your business for the way — the different, all
• 11:09
  the different ways you can get sued for this now, which is a huge
• 11:12
  advantage for companies and people.
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  I think, like, for consumers, it's huge.
• 11:16
  For companies, you comply on this, the people that wanna be
• 11:18
  with you will stay with you.
• 11:20
  So this is a win for everybody, but we absolutely need better systems to
• 11:23
  make it more compliant, and that's where we get back to governance.
• 11:27
  Blake Brannon: Yeah, it's so important, and I think, in the early days, it was
• 11:31
  this compliance-oriented initiative.
• 11:33
  I think I hear more now it's actually an ROI for the
• 11:36
  business, for a couple reasons.
• 11:38
  One, if you can give customers choice and granularity of the choice
• 11:43
  and scoping of what we're using your data for, when are you getting
• 11:46
  communicated to, all these things, you get the opt-down, not the opt-out.
• 11:50
  The worst thing you can have is someone send you a delete-my-information request.
• 11:54
  So you wanna think about, how do I build a relationship and a control
• 11:58
  center which gives that customer choice and control so that they want
• 12:03
  to stay with us and allow us to do these different things with their data?
• 12:07
  The second thing that you gotta think about is building — going back to a
• 12:13
  point I made earlier — but building enough of a trusted relationship with
• 12:16
  that customer where you're able to actually go do really innovative things
• 12:20
  with their data, with AI, that you just couldn't do if you didn't have that
• 12:23
  foundation of trust with them, right?
• 12:25
  And that's one of the many things we help companies with.
• 12:28
  But it very quickly becomes, wow, this isn't a compliance
• 12:31
  below-the-line cost exercise.
• 12:34
  It's actually part of the revenue-enabling strategy for us as a business.
• 12:37
  We get more first-party data, we can do innovative, unique,
• 12:40
  differentiating things with it.
• 12:42
  We can activate that for our customers.
• 12:43
  That all is based on this principle of consent and permission to use
• 12:47
  the data and trust of the user.
• 12:49
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 12:49
  This next question, I want y'all to hang out, hang with me, 'cause this
• 12:52
  is getting a little more technical, but I think it's really important.
• 12:54
  So you talk about this idea of structured context packages, and
• 12:57
  this is — this is purpose, it's consent, it's ethical constraints.
• 13:01
  It's a package of things that are included in handoffs.
• 13:04
  If a marketing ops person is listening to this and is just struggling with email
• 13:08
  opt-outs, and now all of a sudden has to think about these context packages, which
• 13:12
  I think are really important — like, how should someone start thinking about that?
• 13:16
  Blake Brannon: Well, I do think everyone is on different levels of maturity
• 13:19
  with where do they gotta get started.
• 13:20
  You can't skip the brass tacks, basic building blocks of having a universal
• 13:26
  source of truth for what is the consent and permission, and for what
• 13:31
  purposes or use cases we're allowed to use that customer's data for.
• 13:35
  And most people have a fragmented tech stack, right?
• 13:37
  You've got a CRM that's different than the support tool, which maybe
• 13:41
  is different than the web tool, which is different than a campaign tool.
• 13:43
  You need a central source of truth for that, that is agnostic from
• 13:48
  all of those different technologies that you're gonna be using, and
• 13:50
  even as that changes over time.
• 13:52
  So that's kind of a basic start.
• 13:54
  As you get past the basic — oh, there's a binary field for, like, email or
• 13:59
  SMS messaging, you wanna opt out of that — you start to go down the notion
• 14:03
  of, well, we have all this data, but we want to associate not just can we
• 14:08
  use the data for everything, 'cause almost nobody's gonna agree to that.
• 14:12
  Like, can you agree to allow us to use this for everything
• 14:14
  we could ever think of?
• 14:16
  You've gotta break it into specific use cases, or what a compliance or legal
• 14:20
  team would say is purposes of use.
• 14:23
  And the purposes of use give you the right legal structure to be legally binding, so
• 14:28
  you don't get sued, you don't get banned from the FTC to do this for five years,
• 14:31
  which has happened to some companies.
• 14:33
  You're not asked to delete your AI algorithms and your AI data
• 14:37
  pipelines because you misused data that you didn't have consent for.
• 14:41
  All of those are real cases that have happened.
• 14:44
  But you create this structure of a taxonomy that your customers
• 14:47
  can understand, of, here's your toggles that you get choice for,
• 14:51
  and it maps to all the internal operational processes and uses of data.
• 14:55
  So as we think about governance internally, we're thinking about, how do
• 14:59
  we tie the customer-facing choices — that are easy to understand, value exchange
• 15:04
  for — to this back-end system, this back-end system, that back-end system,
• 15:08
  and what's allowed to happen or not?
• 15:10
  So for consent, a very common one in data lakes is this data pipeline that's
• 15:14
  going to this AI model — there's certain customer data that gets stripped out
• 15:18
  of that before it goes into that.
• 15:20
  And that's something we help organizations solve for.
• 15:23
  Matt Heinz: Well, as we wrap up here with — our last of our time here with
• 15:26
  Blake — I think I was impressed that I had come up with the 20-plus patents,
• 15:30
  'cause on LinkedIn it says four-plus.
• 15:31
  I don't know if there's a limit to how many patents they'll let you put on there.
• 15:34
  But—
• 15:34
  Blake Brannon: Maybe it's the referenced ones or—
• 15:35
  Matt Heinz: —something.
• 15:36
  I don't know.
• 15:36
  I don't know what it was.
• 15:37
  We'll add the zero.
• 15:37
  We'll put that in post-production somewhere.
• 15:39
  But I think, you know, I think for a lot of my career, I considered myself kind
• 15:43
  of proudly anti-process, and the idea of governance just felt like a roadblock.
• 15:47
  And I think you nailed it earlier when you said it was — I felt like it was
• 15:50
  constraining my ability to be creative.
• 15:52
  I felt like it was constraining my ability to be scrappy, especially
• 15:54
  working at early-stage companies.
• 15:56
  Like, I'm expected to get things done.
• 15:58
  And so compliance ended up being sort of a loose, not-always-written-down set of
• 16:03
  structures that I may or may not follow.
• 16:05
  And that's a really scary thing in this world, right?
• 16:07
  And so I think I've learned over time that process, bureaucracy, when
• 16:11
  done right, governance — it actually frees me to do the work I wanna do.
• 16:15
  And when I have a system that I trust, and an agentic system that I trust to
• 16:19
  do it consistently and at the speed of business, however we define that,
• 16:24
  I think of all the things that unlocks for me as a marketer, as a go-to-market
• 16:27
  professional, just as an entrepreneur.
• 16:29
  Blake Brannon: Yeah.
• 16:30
  I know we're wrapping, but that's exactly what we think of our mission is — how
• 16:35
  do we help effectively turn everything a compliance and governing team is
• 16:40
  doing in your organization into, like, a real-time API or a real-time agent,
• 16:44
  so that any person that's trying to get stuff done, like you're doing, can on
• 16:48
  demand get the guidance and advice that you would get from the chief privacy
• 16:52
  officer, the head of cybersecurity, the head engineering architect, in a
• 16:57
  risk-based way back to you, so we're not delaying your time to do that.
• 17:02
  Right?
• 17:02
  And I talk a lot to our customers about the thing that is worse than shadow AI
• 17:08
  in your organization that you're trying to solve for is shadow AI governance.
• 17:12
  And it's when you don't take the bull by the horns with your governing compliance
• 17:16
  teams and processes to meet your customers or your users where they are, to provide
• 17:21
  interfaces, experience, and timely capabilities back to them so that you
• 17:25
  can unlock business value and potential, and that's really the goal we're super
• 17:28
  focused on helping organizations achieve.
• 17:30
  Matt Heinz: Well, I gotta be honest, Blake, I did not expect an episode
• 17:33
  about governance to be one of my favorite recordings of the day,
• 17:35
  but this has been a lot of fun.
• 17:36
  Really appreciate — I know you're busy.
• 17:38
  You were on FlowTV earlier today, but appreciate you
• 17:40
  carving out time for us today.
• 17:41
  Blake Brannon: Yeah, it was great.
• 17:42
  Great to have you.
• 17:42
  Thanks for having me.
• 17:43
  Matt Heinz: Awesome.
• 17:43
  Thanks, man.