Tune in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

[00:00:00] Mel Cornford:  Our success has come from really learning from our sales teams and working with both sales enablement customer success to understand, okay, what are the core tools that our sales team are using? We don't wanna add more to their plate. We wanna make their life easier and remove that friction so they can do their job and spend more time with customers closing deals. 

[00:00:27] Sunny Manivannan: Joining me today is a very special guest, Mel Cornford, the customer marketing lead at Canva. Mel has an incredible background with leadership roles across some of Australia's biggest media and digital brands, including Vogue Australia, Yahoo seven and Network 10, where she became the executive editor of 10 Daily.

She then moved into customer marketing in 2020 at Canva, one of the world's most loved design platforms. Mel, it's such an honor to have you on the Peerbound Podcast. Welcome.

[00:00:57] Mel Cornford: Thanks, sunny. So great to chat with you.

[00:00:59] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. I always love hearing about how guests got into customer marketing in the first place. So I'll post the question to you: what was your journey into customer marketing? Tell me about some of your first jobs.

[00:01:11] Mel Cornford: Yeah, of course. You know, like a number of customer marketers, my path was not a conventional one. I originally started in journalism. My first job straight after university was actually working in our local newspaper in my hometown, creating Advertorials, which looking back, that's very early, you know, back in the day type, social proof.

I was always a creative person. I was always a visual person. I knew I wanted to kind of be in that world. Right after university, I wanted to go overseas. I had this big dream of working in a fashion magazine, and I moved to London. I was there for a number of years and instead of landing a role in journalism over there I actually started working for an Australian design boutique, and launched the e-commerce business. So a bit of a segue, but it was also very kind of early stage community because it taught me about e-commerce, about building communities, about customer service, and, you know, I loved that job– kind of put journalism on hold for a little bit.

It was still my passion. When I moved back home, a number of years later, that's when my career started to take off. So I actually landed a role at Marie Claire Magazine. I was running the digital website and it was very early on in the day, like this is pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram, you know, websites back then were largely used as a marketing vehicle for the magazine.

And so, it was a really interesting time. It taught me a lot about editorial planning and stakeholder management. After that I landed the big job, which was at Vogue Australia, which was just like my dream at the time.

I was still in my early, mid twenties and just working at a fashion magazine like Vogue was phenomenal. That's probably where I really started my writing; my Community management. Again, that was just when Facebook and Instagram was starting to take off. And at the time, you know, brands were wondering, well, what are these platforms gonna do for us?

Like, how do we– is it about building audience? Is it about marketing? And so it was really exciting to be part of that. And certainly like, looking back at those brands now and the number of followers and just like how they've adapted strategies. it's incredible to have been part of the very, very early days.

And then, but after magazines, it's when I started to move into, I took a big shift, a few years later and moved into news and moving from magazines into a news world is very, very different. That's when I really started to flex the journalism skills and  I was actually managing teams and working to real time news deadlines. I think what journalism taught me that I've taken into my customer marketing career as well, is that multi-channel, mindset of how you tell a story. This is not just a story that goes in a magazine, like, which was like pre, you know, my earlier roles. It was what's in the magazine and how do we extend that online?

Online, like this was now. How do we tell a story across our digital website, across our social channels, across the broadcast, through the podcast. Strategic skills were definitely flexed. 

And then I moved into my next big role. a former boss of mine, was over at the network in Australia called Network 10. she basically said, we need to set up our digital news presence. I had skills in news, I had skilled in women's publishing, lifestyle magazines, et cetera.

This is when we built a digital news brand from scratch. So all of my passions of building strategy, building audience came to fruition and we built a whole new news brand within a broadcast business. I think getting that across the lines and the multi-stakeholders that were involved and to get this new– this new like business unit off the ground, taught me so much. We built a business case, pitched it to the board, got it approved and then it was like, okay, go forth and build this website. We ultimately had a team of like 20 plus people. We were really ingrained into the news business at that organization.

And it was phenomenal, so, so proud of what we achieved in that time. But of course the world of journalism and media changes very quickly and COVID came along and things changed. A lot of journalists at that time were laid off and unfortunately our team, you know, our business, was shut down at the time.

But that did open up a whole new world, and ultimately led me to Canva, which I can talk more about.

[00:05:21] Sunny Manivannan: That's incredible. I mean, even before you joined Canva, I feel like you'd worked in industries and companies that actually move even faster than startups do.

[00:05:30] Mel Cornford: Yeah, at Network 10, I really would pitch it internally. I'm building a startup within a business. This is a whole new news platform we were targeting the younger audience, who were on their phone every single day, getting their news on the way to work. And listening to podcasts and all these different channels getting their news.

So we were really slicing and dicing how we would engage with our audiences around the clock. Network 10 at the time only had their catch up website template which is where people go to catch up on their programming. There wasn't a real kind of digital news presence and so that was just such a career highlight for us to be able to build that and make that happen.

[00:06:10] Sunny Manivannan: That's incredible. It almost feels like you had, without ever having set foot in customer marketing, you had done so many of the things that make for an effective customer marketer in terms of, you know, the journalistic skills, being able to move at a fast pace and really understanding people's stories and being able to tell it, in these digital formats. And you had seen it all.

[00:06:31] Mel Cornford: Yeah, take that mindset into my customer marketing role now. As I mentioned, how we tell a case study, how it lives on a website, how we can create assets for our sales team, for demand gen, for a lifecycle, for our, you know, flagship events – that multi-channel mindset – I think my journalism skills has certainly really helped me flex that. And because I did not traditionally have, you know, a customer marketing background. I did a communications and media degree at university, so certainly learned a lot about how marketing works and how to engage audiences and all those sorts of things.

But yeah, I think that's certainly how my brain works when we're like building out a story. Every morning in the newsroom, we would have our morning meeting where our journalists would like bring their story ideas. They'll pitch their stories and as editors we would then greenlight, okay, we're gonna do this story today, we're gonna give you that story.

This is the follow, this is the evening story, tomorrow story, et cetera. But in that moment, we would also think about, well, how are we gonna tell this story? How are we gonna package it? What is the distribution plan for this story? It's gonna go on the website, but then what's the piece for social?

What's the piece for the newsletter? so that strategy was kind of baked in from the get go. And that's certainly how I think about our customer stories when we're making those happen too.

[00:07:43] Sunny Manivannan: That's incredible. Alright, so let me take us back to 2020. So you joined Canva, and by the way, Canva has been such an enviable brand for such a long time, so I wanna ask you some questions about that later, but take me back to your first few weeks and months at Canva. What was the role that you signed on to do?

Did you know what it was going to be, or was it one of those make your own adventure type startup roles where you really had to, you know, go define what success looked like? Tell me about that.

[00:08:14] Mel Cornford: Yeah. So when I joined Canva it was during COVID, so my team and I had unfortunately been laid off. I took some time at, you know, to kind of reflect, well, what do I wanna do? I'd been in journalism for like 10 plus years, journalism, there are so many changes. I knew I wanted to pivot into tech and so I really reached out to my network at the time and I built relationships with folks at Facebook, at different organizations that I've been working with.

Canva was like the pinnacle, like Canva was at the top, and actually I was meant to have a meeting with Canva that week to talk about how we could bring Canva into our newsroom. But unfortunately, COVID changed plans and the world. but an email introduction to our CMO, Zach Kaki at the time, helped unlock this opportunity, 

They were hiring for a B2C community stories role. I went through the challenge. I got the job. I was so excited. I just absolutely loved Canva. I had spent a lot of time on Canva during that time that I was off work. And it was exactly that. It was like this is what we wanna do: we wanna tell community stories at scale and everyday community members from small business owners to entrepreneurs, to students, to teachers doing incredible things in the classrooms across the globe. There was no shortage of stories for us to be able to tell. It was a real turning point because at that point a lot of those stories lived in our Canva Love channel and people would post, like my barista told me how much they love Canva and be like, here's what they use on their social media, and here's what my child made at school And, for me, it was the absolute best role because I could tell feel-good stories with the world that, hand on heart, spoke to how Canva is changing their lives, changing their business. Like our mission at Canva is to empower the world to design. And so every single time I connected with someone, like I felt that I got that Canva love through those conversations, and we started to tell and celebrate our community stories through our marketing, you know, through huge tier one outdoor campaigns, through creating series on social media – yeah, it was just absolutely amazing. And as I said, there was just no shortage of stories to tell.

[00:10:22] Sunny Manivannan: That's awesome. I wanna ask you, how did you find these community members beyond the Canva Love channel? What are some of your favorite stories?

[00:10:32] Mel Cornford: Yeah, there are so many. So how did I find them? I worked really closely with our community team. We have a global community team and engagement team and they're constantly in our social groups, across our social platforms, seeing where and how community members are just like celebrating the Canva love.

Looking back, I thought it could be a really cool idea to create a website, to drive a campaign and encourage our community share your story and we would celebrate them and give them canvas swag and gifts, and that did work to a degree that was the smallest kind of segment of capturing stories.

They just existed in this beautiful virtual world. And so it was really about using technology, connecting with our engagement teams and helping to identify stories. How I identified them– I was always looking for stories that really spoke to our key pillars. And that was about, you know, being an empowering human.

They always had some sort of impact different to the impact that we tell now in B2B. But there was impact in how it was like helping someone's business, changing their lives, launching a new venture. As I said, just no shortage. 

Canva notes as we call ourselves. Other people in the Canva business would be DMing me on slack and actually I got a number of really incredible stories through that. But I think, you know, call it journalistic instinct, like, the curiosity that you have as a journalist. I think I had that within me to like really hunt down the stories.

And actually when I did my challenge for Canva, I basically did a lot of digging across the internet. And connected with people and could verify how they use Canva and did many interviews as if I was already in the role.

One of my favorite stories: I found this World War II veteran. His name was Sam Baker and he had a dream to become a children's book author, and through the use of Canva and some of his close friends created a whole campaign that basically launched his book career at 98 years old.

And so I actually built a relationship with Sam and his daughter, Sam, featured in our holiday campaign, a few years later. And if you just saw, like he just lived this incredibly rich life where he did this beautiful montage with his voiceover and he had this beautiful, like Mississippi, sun draw, like he is just the most incredible human.

And his books were all about teaching kids about kindness and giving back and just themes that like– it’s just so important I think to teach the next generation. Sadly, I did find out that Sam passed away but he continued his career, book career, and I did actually stay in touch with him and his daughter.

he just sent me his last book that he published. So I think it just goes to show like, I was almost destined just to be a customer marketer because you build those relationships with whomever you're talking to and you really form bonds and want to tell and celebrate their stories 

I also met this incredible duo. They were travel agents and during COVID they lost their jobs. Obviously, like travel completely came to a standstill, but through Canva, they built this whole new brand, this whole new website and business, called elsewhere and created a beautiful brand.

It looked so professional. They did it themselves, like totally bootstrap business. They featured in one of our global campaigns and their company was bought by Lonely Planet, one or two years later. So it was just like this incredible success story and again, staying in touch with those folks and just exciting to see the launch pad that Canva can be for someone's new business.

[00:14:03] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I mean, just hearing you talk about these stories has brought me closer to the brand. So I can only imagine what people actually reading or watching these stories feel, and that really is the power of storytelling, right?

[00:14:16] Mel Cornford: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I'm so passionate about it.

[00:14:19] Sunny Manivannan: It's incredible. Incredible. I wanna ask you about switching from B2C to now the B2B and the enterprise side of the house. How long have you been working on the B2B side of the house? What's different from your perspective?

[00:14:32] Mel Cornford: Yeah. So I've been in this B2B role probably for just over two years now. We started to make that pivot from being the platform for our everyday community to being the platform that can be used in businesses and enterprises globally. So we launched at Canva Enterprise, in April, 2024.

At the time, we had case studies. They lived on a website, but there was no real collateral for sales. There wasn't a real distribution strategy. We had an incredible opportunity to tell and celebrate these success stories of fortune 500 companies–  we just needed to be able to build that customer marketing strategy for us to amplify those.

I actually have been surprised that there is some similarities between B2C and B2B. At the core, like there are still humans in these stories, be it a startup or be it a CMO in a Fortune 500 company, they both have very similar challenges in their roles and in their companies or fears that they need to solve, you know, be it, brand consistency, security, how do they scale really quickly, with a small team, if you're a smaller company. And, how you're also like scaling to then localize for your global teams, you know, if you're at that enterprise level. So I think there have definitely been similarities in how I'm connecting these people and finding they all share very similar challenges just on different levels.

And both absolutely light up when they see what Canva can then offer their business. Be it you are using our pro or our team's business skew right up to the enterprise when you are basically, you know, we're rolling out Canva to thousands of people within an organization. 

[00:16:21] Sunny Manivannan: It's amazing. I wanna ask you a little bit about your approach to storytelling, whether it's B2B or B2C, Canva's always had such a human first brand, and that may be from your original community and, creator roots of really focusing on the creator and the person who's trying to get something difficult done and how Canva makes it so not just easy, but also beautiful. What's your approach to storytelling and what lessons do you think other marketers who are listening to this could perhaps take from this?

[00:16:51] Mel Cornford: Yeah, I think I definitely like put my journalism hat on when I'm approaching these stories. And as I mentioned, like always thinking about how we can squeeze the best out of an interview or a shoot that we do with our customers, so we can really maximize and amplify the story, of course, for our teams, but for those brands as well.

And that kind of, mutual, marketing benefit. So we have a tiered approach to how we do stories. Tier one is when we partner with our big strategic partners, you know, it's a huge logo, there's an incredible use case– thousands of team members that are using Canva.

Some examples of partners that we've done stories with, you know, Deloitte, DocuSign, planning a story with Stripe at the moment. This is when we would plan an actual big budget shoot with those teams. We'll interview their key leaders, executives, but also those who are hands on with Canva and we'll craft.

What we call our hero story, like the real premium, two minute film that will be sliced and diced into many different kinds of formats. We'll also have the written case study, and there's a full go-to-market campaign that we roll out from these stories. That's something we did not happen when I first started, but we've certainly seen incredible success from being able to leverage the content that you can create off the back of those shoots.

But those videos are seen by millions of people. They are what we feature like on the stage at our flagship events like Canva create on stage at some of the you know industry events that we partner with. But we're also creating shorter, bite-size, snackable content that our sales team can use really easily on a call with a prospect or sending us a follow up.

So we're getting so much mileage out of those shoots. I'm really proud about that. But also partnering with those brands, you know, sharing that on social tagging those advocates in the films and then they're also sharing and amplifying from their channel. So there's a mutual benefit as well.

They're being seen in this thought leader expert light by sharing their learnings and expertise in our stories. So, there's those tier ones, but where we've seen a lot of success is how we're scaling what I call our tier twos. And they're probably– this is where my newsroom hat comes on as well.

They're short, snackable, social first type content. And we take them just directly from interviews like this. When we're interviewing our customers, we'll slice them up into real socially native pieces of content. And because they don't need as much production, we can turn them around much faster.

So that has been a huge unlock just in the last few seasons. We've been able to really scale that content and partnering with our creative team, you know, Canva being Canva, we have an incredible creative team who've created these beautiful templates for us to easily take quotes from our customers and drop them into our decks and drop them into one by one.

And, I think I've shared some with you before, Sunny, like they are just absolutely magnificent. And we can easily, without having to log a ticket with that creative team, we can easily pick out those best quotes and create our own mini campaigns off the back of that. So our team to be able to run autonomously and still create content that is on brand, you know, our customers still signs off on everything that we create, but we're unlocking so much more for our sales teams and partners to be able to then showcase those stories.

So I think having that tiered model has certainly helped us build a really strong customer story engine room that is powering our entire business.

[00:20:22] Sunny Manivannan: That's incredible. You know, when you say social first content, my first question in my mind was, what makes for great social first content? Mel, tell us. Tell us, tell me first, what makes for great social first content? How do you, with your years of training and your judgment, how do you look at a video interview and say, this is gonna do well? 

[00:20:46] Mel Cornford: Again, I think this is what I really learned working in a newsroom because you're always creating a story that is designed for someone to click, be it the headline, be it the image, be it the snippet on video that you want someone to stop and scroll. There is so much disruption out there.

Like if you want to be able to get someone's attention really quickly. And so what we've learned is that it needs to be made for the platform. It needs to be human first and really authentic. While there is still such a place and value in our big budget customer shoots, some of those stories don't perform as well as an organic piece of content.

They're really great for pay, they're really great for our demand gen, but what we're seeing is that it needs to be human and native for the platform. So what we're doing on our shoots with our customers, we've created this TikTok style, thought leadership type series where we ask rapid fire questions.

It's not the like sit down interview. It's really short, sharp, fast, and you are getting those moments, those sound bites that stop people scrolling. There's thought leadership, it's a great ROI point, it's an incredible nugget that someone has seen success in their business and using Canvas.

So we are starting to like ramp that up and thinking about, okay, which platform is this going to live on? What style of content suits that platform? And just given our appetite for video content, it really needs to be video first. But I would just say at the core, like the human, that real human element, it needs to be authentic, real, and relatable.

[00:22:19] Sunny Manivannan: I love everything about what you've said, and for listeners, I think this is really giving people an insider's look into why Canva is one of the world's most admired brands because everything is human first. It's really creator first, and you are where your audience is and you're thinking about stories in such creative ways.

You're not just saying, ‘Hey, let's take this 30 minute interview and try to, you know, take bite-sized versions of this and try to compress it down.’ You're actually saying, ‘No, let's create for these platforms and have that be, sort of, first among equals rather than try to make it an afterthought.’

[00:22:55] Mel Cornford: Yeah, a hundred percent. But also we wanna be mindful of our customer's time when we're on these shoots too. So it's like we're not trying to create more, per se. I think we're just trying to be smarter about what we create. I think we've really learned that, in the last couple of seasons.

[00:23:11] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. Wonderful. Well, let's talk about Canva Enterprise a little bit. Now that you've been in this world for a few years now, the business has grown tremendously. You know, Canva for enterprise– I hear about it all the time now and even people that are sort of in my network that work at quote unquote old school companies are now telling me stories about Canva.

And it really– there's such a sort of groundswell adoption of this platform. I'd love to hear a little bit about what is causing that growth within companies, in your view, and learn a little bit more about how you're sort of tapping into that movement within the enterprise.

[00:23:47] Mel Cornford: Yeah, there are a few different elements to it. Like number one, we have an incredible sales team. They do an incredible job and we really work hand in hand sales and marketing, across the entire go to market function. We have this sales methodology that we call the bow tie.

It's essentially our sales funnel. but it shows where and how Sales and Marketing are working hand in hand across that entire journey. You know, from awareness through to acquisition, through to implementation, onboarding, expansion, retention, and, you know, it takes a village, but everyone works in synergy to ensure that we are creating the best experience for our customers.

Of course, social proof plays a key role in that. I'm really proud of the repository of stories that we've been able to create to then empower our sales teams to then sell and celebrate those stories when they're talking to customers, and what we are doing to then further train our sales team. So to really ensure that we're working with enablement. So we're training sales on how to then speak to those stories when they're talking to customers. So it doesn't just go on a website, just doesn't go in our library, like we're actually building in training so then they can actually learn it and know those stories off by heart when they're talking to their customers. 

[00:25:07] Mel Cornford: And I think just by sales and marketing working hand in hand, we've really been able to highlight the benefits of Canva Enterprise and what it can do for businesses. 

And then like through our marketing, it's always through the lens of our customers. I think that's where our customer marketing content comes through. We work so closely with our demand gen team to tell and celebrate the stories through their marketing, and then we're helping individuals see what's possible with Canva.

[00:25:32] Mel Cornford: I think that's giving enterprise leaders the confidence to see that Canva can scale to the level of complexity 

[00:25:39] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. I have to ask you a rookie question, which is when you talked about the bow tie model and the partnership between marketing and sales. All I could think about is, marketing one half of the bow tie and sales is the other half of the bow tie, or why is it the bow tie model? Tell me a little bit more about that.

[00:25:56] Mel Cornford: The bow tie model is meant to really highlight that it takes that village. It takes sales and marketing working in synergy to be able to really, like obviously close deals, but ensure that there's a great experience for customers as they're moving through our sales funnel.

So, you know, on the left hand side is really where a lot of our programs come to play, as I mentioned through, performance, marketing, demand, gen, that awareness, that top of funnel, you know, we then wanted to be able to then convert those audiences to MQLs and then it becomes a sales opportunity.

And that's kind of when it's handed over to our sales teams. But again, that's when customer proof comes into play because they're on those calls with those prospects, they're understanding what their challenges are, helping them to see how we could then solve those problems and sharing examples of customers that have seen success.

So that's kind of the first stage. Obviously then when they close, amazing, they go through implementation, they go through onboarding, and that's when so much unlocks for our programs as well. That's when we can start to speak to advocates, case study openers, references, speaking, all of that.

At the moment we're starting to build our advocacy program within the enterprise space, which I'm so excited and passionate about. It will help us just also create this full funnel customer marketing function that services every kind of stage of that sales journey or appetite. 

[00:27:19] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. That's great. I wanna ask you a little bit about working with sales teams and specifically meeting sales teams where they already are 

[00:27:28] Mel Cornford: Yeah. 

[00:27:29] Sunny Manivannan: Canva’s sales team, no doubt, is very busy. And how do you ensure that you are constantly delivering value to them? What are the challenges that you're seeing them face and how are you helping partner with them to really ensure their success?

[00:27:45] Mel Cornford: It comes down to what customer marketers do, and that's build relationships. Like you need to build your relationships internally with your sales teams as much as you're obviously building them with your customers, by understanding their pain points. It's becoming more and more challenging for sales. There is so much competition, budgets are tight, buyers are becoming more and more risk averse. So just being able to get from them what their challenges are, how we can make their lives easier and support them and hitting their goals, which obviously in turn helps us achieve our goals.

Our success has come from really learning from our sales teams and working with both sales enablement customer success to understand, okay, what are the core tools that our sales team are using? We don't wanna add more to their plate. We wanna make their life easier and remove that friction so they can do their job and spend more time with customers closing deals versus obviously like digging through decks or digging through websites to find those customer proof. So right now we're doing an overhaul of our customer marketing library and repository and looking at how we can then make it much faster for them to find those great quotes and testimonials, those video snippets, so they can then share those with their customers.

That's why I'm very excited that we're working with Peerbound to help us then really easily look into our proof library not only for what exists, but like seeing other opportunities. 

[00:29:09] Sunny Manivannan:. One of the things that I know you're doing, which to me seems extremely powerful, is this idea of a proof task force within Canva. Walk us through that. You are the spearhead of that, but who else is involved in your customer proof task force within the company? Why did you even think to do this?

[00:29:30] Mel Cornford: Yeah, customer marketing does not live on an island, it is plugged into so many different teams and obviously benefits so many. We'd built an incredible library of stories, but we knew that there were oppportunities for us to fill some gaps and for various different verticals, very different personas.

So we pulled together a task force. We've called it internally, the customer proof task force, where we have sales members, PMM, obviously our customer marketing team, a few folks from comms– it will start to expand a little bit more.

But this is where we also dug into data. We looked at win-loss analysis. We surveyed our sales teams before we did this. What are they using the most? What is missing from our library? So we really got insights from them firsthand to hear how we can help support them and what we needed to unlock really quickly.

So that was an incredible body of work. I think through that we uncovered around 45 potential leads that we could then explore and start to really then flesh out for this, bolster that strategy some more. It's also just uniting teams and helping them to understand like how we can work together, how important social proof is, and for PMM, they're also getting real insights into our customer's use cases. And we're discussing win-loss. We're discussing QBRs. We're like, we're sharing all this feedback that might get stuck in a deck or might be in a slack thread that hasn't been shared elsewhere. So it's really like uniting those key voices and leaders across those divisions to have a shared goal and shared success.

[00:31:03] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome. We're obviously in the early stages of AI impacting all of our work, and you have already seen the digital revolution, in the media industry, and you actually spearheaded that, in your world. And now you have a chance to spearhead how AI impacts customer proof and really revenue at Canva.

Is AI replacing what humans are doing within Canva? How do you see the role of AI? Clearly, you're leveraging it in many ways, whether it's tools like Peerbound or your internal workflows that are created by you and others. What's your take on all of this?

[00:31:40] Mel Cornford: I'm a firm believer that AI is not replacing humans. AI is really helping us to unlock efficiency– to enable humans to do their jobs better and faster. The biggest unlock for us in customer marketing has certainly been around where we can use AI with a lot of our content and actually scaling and crafting content at a much faster rate.

I built this Claude project tool, and we are training it to be able to craft our case studies in our style, in our format in canvas tone and style, but also in a snackable kind of scannable ROI impact led piece of content that will need around 20% of editing for us creating them from scratch. So we'll take a transcript from a customer interview and we've training the tools, like pretend you're an IC buyer at X company, I want you to create a solutions led case study that will help us speak to key buyers in X industry. Go, essentially, and it will create the story. It gets us to about 80% there, and we might need like one or two hours of polishing, editing, like between myself or one of our copywriters, but it's saving us around two days of like creating a story from scratch before we'd like.

I get the transcript and we pull out all the key quotes and then, you know, put on my old journalism hat again and create the story from scratch. And I think that's just been the biggest unlock because we can create their stories faster, get it to our customers, get them live, get them to sales, which means that we can focus more time on strategy or spending more time with new customers and creating more of those opportunities.

So, that's just been such an unlock. I firmly believe that humans are not being replaced in that regard. It still takes a human to conduct that interview. You still need someone to be able to have this conversation and dig deeper when a customer might say X, Y, or Z, machines aren't doing that.

Relationships are not gonna be replaced by AI.

[00:33:36] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I wanna ask you a little bit about, you know, there's so much happening in the world of customer marketing itself, where it feels like the function is at an inflection point where there are marketers like yourself that are very AI forward and they're saying, look, I want to just get more impact out of every single hour of my day.

And then there are marketers that are still hesitant to dip their toes into the water. How would you advise somebody to start their AI journey if they're still sort of hesitant or maybe nervous about what this means for them? How would you start if you were just, you know, starting your AI journey today?

[00:34:16] Mel Cornford: I would recommend someone to start their AI journey just start experimenting. I think so much innovation can come from trialing and testing outta GPT.

We have unlocked so much, and I think when I caught up with you in New York recently, I was telling you about, we ran a discovery week here at Canva where we were all encouraged to be tools down and just experiment with AI. We had leaders coming in from open AI and Claude and Glean and teaching us new tricks of what we can use and like that for a company to encourage its employees to be so AI forward was absolutely incredible. On a call with chat GPT I created a customer marketing pitching GPT– which for a customer marketer you would know it takes time to craft a pitch for a case study or a reference or a quote, or even just ping sales, like checking in on how things are going with X customer.

We created this GPT and it's just been such an unlock to quickly get that snippet that you need to maybe edit slightly and then send it to your customer or to your sales team. That would not have happened without experimentation. So I would say like I'm a big believer of like just in getting started, focusing on progress versus perfection.

And I think that's something that Canva has certainly taught me as well. Like we are encouraged to do the best work of our lives and just to be able to experiment, test, learn quickly, and then take things forward, you know, rather than getting stuck, like AI is also the perfect playing ground just to brainstorm, just to jam in a dock and tell me about X, Y, z. Like, it's just incredible. I think the opportunities and I think until you get started, you are missing out on a huge opportunity if you're not experimenting in that space.

[00:36:00] Sunny Manivannan: So true. Love what you said about just get started, just experiment and no expectations, just go.

[00:36:07] Mel Cornford: A hundred percent.

[00:36:09] Sunny Manivannan: I wanna ask you now about, you know, folks that are earlier career in customer marketing, if someone listening to this is early in their customer marketing journey or maybe building an advocacy program for the first time, right now in September, 2025, what's something that you know you would tell them or perhaps you wish somebody had told you earlier?

[00:36:31] Mel Cornford: Learn fast, connect with your peers, connect with someone you see who's doing something, you've seen them post something, really inspiring on LinkedIn. Start following those people. Start reaching out and, you know, customer marketers are really generous by nature– they wanna help people win, right? That's what we're doing with our customers. And so I have like form such incredible relationships and learned so much through my network and just by like reaching out to people 

Some of my best moves have come from conversations I've had or helped me verify a thought that I've been having about doing something within our program. So that would be my biggest take. And also like, pay it back, like when someone reaches out to you, take that call, and build that relationship and be able to like pay it forward.

My other big advice is, as I was saying, as a customer marketer, you need to build your relationships both externally and internally. So connect with your sales teams, connect with PMM, connect with enablement, connect with customer success, find out what the challenges are within those teams and how you can help them.

Always thinking about, well, what's in it for them and where does this help me achieve my goal if I help them win? I think that's also a really fast way for you to build relationships, but also connect dots with your programs or fix challenges that you might be having. So it's almost like a loaded catch up, but it's also in benefiting your business.

So I would definitely say to form those bonds and just help, you know, build relationships internally. And then third, as I was saying, I'm a big believer in testing, iterating before you scale. With so many tools that marketers have access to now, unless you are like testing and learning really quickly, I think you can get stuck or make expensive mistakes that are just going to cost you time or, you know, put you on the back foot from achieving your goals. Try, test, learn really fast and then you can iterate from there. Don't get scared in trying to make things perfect from the get go. Just my motto essay is internally: let's focus on progress versus perfection.

[00:38:31] Sunny Manivannan: Love that. Mel, this was such a wonderful conversation. I'm so, so happy to have you on this podcast. And just a delight, I can't wait for this episode to go out. And as an additional bonus to our listeners, we should include in the show notes some of these snackable videos that Canvas created, so I'll love to ask you for that.

And thank you again for joining us.

[00:38:52] Mel Cornford: Thank you, sunny. Thank you for having me. I'd love to do that. Thank you to you too for creating this podcast and for paying it forward for customer marketers and the insights you're sharing are so valuable. So yeah, massive shout out to you.

[00:39:05] Sunny Manivannan: Thank you, Mel.