[DISCLAIMER] The following transcript is being delivered UNEDITED via a streaming service. This transcript has not been proofread. It is a draft transcript, NOT a certified transcript. It may contain computer-generated mistranslations and spelling errors.
Introduction: Be’Anka Ashaolu, Director of Marketing, Propel
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Be’Anka Ashaolu: Final keynote date one Tiffani Bova futurists Salesforce growth and innovation evangelist and best selling author growth IQ.
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BA: will speak to us about customer trends and having successfully sale to your audience is shifting and ever expanding commands.
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BA: at Salesforce to people who works with some of the most innovative companies in the world as they look to transform the way they engage with customers grow their business and create amazing customer experiences.
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BA: Over the names of the fingers 15 2019 global ranking and management thinkers, one of the most powerful and influential women in California and from the national diversity Council.
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BA: And one of the top 50 sales and marketing influencers by top sales World magazine ink magazine and LinkedIn today with you.
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BA: We're thrilled to have Tiffani Bova here for promotion 2020 and can't wait to hear her insight on a connected consumer over to you, Tiffani.
Presentation by Tiffani Bova, Best Selling Author of Growth IQ
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Tiffani Bova: Hi, my name is Tiffani Bova I'm the growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce. I couldn't be more thrilled to be with you here today to talk about growth is a thinking game and becoming very customer centric.
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TB: And so it's just an honor to be here, you know, look, I wish I was there in person and I was standing on some stage.
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TB: But I'm there in spirit, you're here with me in spirit. And so I hope you enjoy this presentation.
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TB: So let me start by saying let's set the scene, setting the scene is a great way to shape the context of the conversation we're about to have for me context is everything.
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TB: Before you make any decisions about building out your go to market models or your growth strategies or your marketing plans or how are you going to sell and engage
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TB: Should you be more customer centric or more product lead, whatever the case might be. You have to ground it in context, who are your customers. What is your product.
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TB: What is your culture, what are you known for all of those things, those answers have to be shaped before you ever go down the journey of figuring out what's the best way to grow your business.
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TB: But the first thing I'll tell you is that growth and comfort rarely coexist.
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TB: This is a statement from January many when she was still the CEO of IBM. It was the one of the opening quotes of my book growth IQ.
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TB: It's a shorter version of a much longer, quote, but I think you get the point. If you're going to be making a lot of changes. We have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
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TB: Especially when it comes to growth because we're not always going to get the right decision made the first time we may have to make a decision. Fail iterate try again. Fail iterate and try again.
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TB: But you have to have a culture that's willing to embrace change and embrace failure, but also embrace the process.
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TB: Thinking about how are we going to get from where we are to where we need to go. Knowing all the things we know about our individual companies contest.
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TB: The one thing for sure is. We're all sharing in this new digital imperative. There's really no separation, whether you're a B2B company.
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TB: A B to C company D to C Company A B to B to C company whenever you might call yourself at the end of the day.
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TB: Everybody is rapidly transforming now the pandemic and coven may have accelerated. A lot of digital transformation for many B2B companies, the B2C environment has been digitally transforming for some time.
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TB: The shift to digital channels is really being driven by the importance of digital apps and this rise of digital communication.
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TB: But at the end of the day, we have to make sure that we're supporting our employees.
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TB: Those employees that are engaging with customers on the phone via video designing products, providing customer service and support.
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TB: legal teams to put together contracts the web designers that build out the commerce, everything has to be thought of from an employee lens as well.
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TB: And then you have to think about building digital communities. How do you pull your employees.
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TB: And your broader shareholders together into a single focus and that happens really when you have strong community and making them digital is a great way to make sure that you keep your people.
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TB: Engaged but this digital customer is changing everything because we've depending on where you are in the world. We've sort of passed the habit forming time
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TB: It's about 66 days before a habit is formed and depending, as I said, where you are in the world are 6789 months into
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TB: Working from home educating from home doing so much of what we used to do out and about in our offices and meeting with customers. We're now doing from a singular location.
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TB: And so digital is just absolutely critical to success. But the digital divide is still real we have many, many people, even in the US. Some 19 million that don't have access to high speed internet. So when you think about delivering solutions in a digital fashion, you have to
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TB: Again, remember, who are your customers. How do they want to buy. How do they want to engage with you before you go down the path of planning.
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TB: But this is all about is changing customer behavior. We've recently done some research here at Salesforce and I can tell you
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TB: That this statement this quote of mine that literally is about seven years old is actually more relevant today that customers will pay more.
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TB: And remember the experience that they have with the brand much longer than the price they paid
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TB: I usually use Uber. As an example, and I'll ask the audience. How many of you have caught Uber. In the last 30 days and almost the entire audience would raise their hands and say, I have
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TB: And I would say, how many of you remember the price that you paid and most hands would go down.
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TB: But if I asked them, Do you remember if the car was smelly was the music loud. Did he take the right route. Was there a lot of traffic. You remember the experience that you had during that Uber ride.
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TB: More so than you may even remember the price and why customer experience has become this new battleground over the last five years, and that is not slowing down anytime soon.
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TB: consumers expect companies to actually know what their behavior will be and then also transform the way they behave
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TB: We had done some research and found that the term innovation. When customers say I want the brands I engage with to innovate. It's about innovating for them.
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TB: When you don't innovate, maybe you don't have an app, you don't have 24 seven customer service that might be served by a bot. You don't have relevant and personalized and predictive marketing.
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TB: What that says to them, as you have apathy towards them as a customer so 62% of consumers expect companies to adapt based on actions and behavior.
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TB: They're actually willing to give you more data. If you use that data to deliver better experiences.
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TB: And 54% of consumers think companies need to fundamentally Trent chunk transform how they engage
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TB: Meaning, how you engage sort of 2019 and prior may not be how you need to engage going forward.
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TB: And they're learning how they want to have brands engage with them I all their other interactions. So even in a completely different industry in a completely different region.
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TB: A completely different sized company that they're buying from
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TB: If they have an exemplary excellent experience. And then they come to you and they don't have that kind of same engagement or feeling they compare you to them. Once again, even if you're in a totally different industry.
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TB: So this customer experience requires us to think much differently about the role of sales operations.
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TB: And the reason is because customers want to have consistent interactions across the departments, they engage with
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TB: That happens at the ops level right you have to make sure that your employees have the access to the information they need in order to serve your customer.
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TB: Because at the end of the day, that's what's important, how they feel when they engage with your brand.
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TB: 59% of customers say that it feels like they're communicating with separate departments when they deal with companies.
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TB: So I got a marketing campaign, whether it be a mailer, whether it be an email or a phone call or a banner or an article I read
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TB: And then I decided to pick up the phone and maybe call in to talk to a salesperson. And I have a totally different experience.
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TB: And I choose to buy and I have a problem. So I call customer service and I have a
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TB: nother totally different experience. That's what I mean by customers are saying, I want to feel like I'm dealing with the same company that they know me.
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TB: I'm sure all of us have experienced from multiple brands. When you get transferred to someone else in a customer service organization.
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TB: And they know nothing about you and they end up asking you the same four or five questions that you just answered in the previous call maybe even the previous
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TB: Two or three calls. And so that really sends a message that you're not investing in the technology to give the seamless engagement to your customers.
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TB: And then 48% of Sales Ops teams are more involved in these cross functional work streams. The one thing I'll add to this slide.
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TB: Is change management becomes really critical when you start using technology to shift the conversation, both internally with employees as well as your customers.
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TB: At when you change something on one side of the business. You have to think of that unintended consequence on the other side of the business. So Sales Ops partner with a change management organization is a really powerful combination
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TB: Now let's set the framework around what customers want from us now, and I'm going to ground it in a little bit of history.
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TB: It started out that we were very reactive. A customer will call, leave us a message, we would call them back there was a problem, they would call
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TB: They would either leave a message or send an email and we would call them that we were reacting to an action that they did to us, first as technology started to keep catch up. We became much more proactive.
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TB: Your credit card is going to expire in 90 days. I don't want your service to interrupt. So I'm going to
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TB: Reach out to you and say, Hey, your credit card has expired. We don't want to lapse in service. Can you update your credit card or can you call in and let us know what it is.
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TB: And then once that's updated it actually saves that customer the hassle of having their service canceled having to call in, or maybe not even realizing
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TB: That it was cancelled or missing the communication and never signing back up, but that proactive action out of customer service or sales or marketing show the customers that you knew a little bit more about them.
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TB: Now we're in an age of being very predictive
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TB: Customers who have apples and oranges are more likely to buy a pious and so going into your basic customers and saying, Hey, how many customers do we have that have apples and oranges.
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TB: Let's offer them pliers, because we can tell from the data that they're more likely to do it and they're more likely to do it.
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TB: At about 16 days into them being customers with us. And if they do it. We know that they're more likely to refer, for us, or give us a case study or do a webinar us whatever the case might be.
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TB: Looking at the data, analyzing that data, taking those insights and becoming much more predictive sends the right signal to your customers.
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TB: Especially if you are looking to grow the business. During this time, that may be net new customer acquisition is getting more challenging.
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TB: And that is really lens that lends itself to artificial intelligence. You know, we've talked about it for a long time. It's been sort of underneath the scenes Hidden Hidden
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TB: Behind the Walls, if you will, doing things that maybe even customers and consumers and employees don't know AI is actually doing.
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TB: But I can tell you that the powerful combination between humans and technology is not going to go away anytime soon.
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TB: AI helps deliver those personalized experiences. I was just describing it improves customer segmentation look like modeling right apples and oranges and papaya is
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TB: It surfacing insights and data what the next best action is likely to be for that particular customer
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TB: And then automated customer interactions, making sure that, you know, look, you just reached out to resolve your problem. Is there anything else we can do
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TB: Why not set that up in an automated fashion so that you don't rely on the humans to do it and not because they can't do it, but because you want the human side of the engagement to happen in a much more prescriptive value based
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TB: operating model. And so 72% of high performers can analyze performance in real time in real time.
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TB: That means not only deploying technology, but using the technology so that you can see in real time should we make those adjustments.
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TB: Remember at the beginning, when I was talking about context. I was saying, if you can understand what's happening. You can action.
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TB: You can test you can fail you can learn. You can iterate. You can test again.
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TB: In real time that's even more powerful. Now I don't want you to change things 10 times a day. That's not the goal. It's to start to look for patterns so that you can change things at the right time with the right product or right message to the right set of customers.
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TB: So this customer experience conversation is one which, as I said, I've talked about for a long time.
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TB: The very first chapter in my book growth IQ was actually all about customer experience, starting with the customer is a great way to frame all the decisions that you make.
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TB: If your employees have what they need. Now it's time to say what can we do for our customers.
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TB: 68% of C suite are emphasizing CX over products. Remember the Uber example. It's not that your product is an important PLEASE DON'T HEAR THAT.
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TB: But it has to be this whole product experience of how they felt when they engage with your sales people customer service. How easy where their instructions was a user interface easy
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TB: Was the engagement frictionless, did they feel like it was a laborious process or was it really, really simple. And that kind of lack of friction goes a long way to drive strong customer engagement.
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TB: 70% of buyer experiences are based on how customers and are they feel they're being treated
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TB: That has nothing to do with the product, right. So even if the product is good enough and you deliver an exemplary service, you have a shot at getting them to come back. Think about a restaurant. The food was good but the service was fantastic. Your
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TB: Back its food was fantastic, and the service was terrible. You may not go back. So really thinking about how do your customers feel
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TB: And then grow growth rates are higher when you have brands that have pivoted towards
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TB: Thinking about the customer and that experience and putting them at the center of the decisions that you make around growth products expansion all kinds of topics.
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TB: And then CX drives over two thirds of customer loyalty outperforming brand and price comes along.
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TB: So there's huge power behind read aligning yourself around that experience and then customer expectations rule all other categories of how an enterprise defined a digital business.
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TB: So digitizing investing in digital marketing digitally transforming the way you sell and conduct commerce and do service has everything to do with making it easier, making the experience better, not only for your employees and for your customers as well.
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TB: So how do you build a modern growth company if I said, start with the context. Understand that impact of digital focusing in on the customer and putting them at the center. What are the things you need to do.
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TB: Well, this quote. We don't have a tech problem we have a people in process problem. It's not lost on me. Obviously I work for a very, very large.
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TB: technology company at Salesforce. It's not that the technology doesn't have its own challenges, but at the end of the day, the best technology will only work as good as the people in process.
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TB: To support it. Are the people logging in. Are they using it to the processes support a power of that technology like when I started
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TB: My journey on the worldwide web all the way back in 2000 I was a local as beta client and constant contacts beta client. And at the time, the marketing technology stack. There was maybe 12 or 15 various companies.
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TB: There's now some at 500 martek products as just an example that tells you there's no shortage of technology.
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TB: But yet, when people aren't able to do things in real time, or they're capturing the data and they're not doing anything with it.
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TB: They're not reimagining how they organize their teams. They're not breaking down silos have sort of shared metrics that is a people and process problem.
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TB: So technology people in process in combination is super powerful. But if the people in process or off even the best technology will struggle to be successful.
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TB: And that is because of these silos that have been in business forever. This is nothing new.
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TB: But most of the time we talked about breaking down the silos between sales and marketing and I'm going to expand that a little bit.
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TB: I want you to think about sales, marketing and customer service or customer success, depending on what you call it.
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TB: Remember customer see one company and those disconnected teams are usually driven because of disconnected metrics, give you a quick example.
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TB: And, you know, just an example at that right sales go sell, sell whatever you can marketing drive as many leads as you can, good or bad customer service, get the customer off the phone in three minutes or less.
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TB: Those metrics may be the productivity metrics you even have in place today, but those three metrics actually drive those three groups into three very different directions.
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TB: Sales is saying I'm closing deals. I don't need all those leads
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TB: And those leads aren't very good anyway marketing is saying sales and following up on these leads. We've scored them their marketing qualified there now sales qualified, they're not doing anything with them.
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TB: And then customer service. There was a stat many years ago that some 25% or so of quotes coming out of the CRM system would be coming from customer service if used to view customer service as a cost center.
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TB: And you're missing out on the opportunity to have them be a another growth engine for you.
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TB: And when you do either of those two things have just connected teams disconnected metrics, the unintended consequence is a disconnected experience for your customer.
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TB: I'm forced to get off the phone in three minutes, or they don't respond
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TB: In time, or they respond with something totally different. Because that's what their metric is for the day instead of just solving the issue or the problem with the opportunity. I've reached out that I want to have
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TB: Help with. So you have to make sure that you break these down.
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TB: But not only from an organizational structure. I don't want the silos to go away. I want to connective tissue between them. You need silos from a management and a skill set and a hiring.
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TB: And all of those things. It's very important, but at least maybe one, two or three common KPIs between those three groups is a great way to start to get everybody rowing in the same direction.
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TB: And you have to figure out how do we take this transformation and close the alignment gap between the strategy and the innovations that you'll be doing and how do you actually align everybody and execute
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TB: You know, I know you heard from Geoffrey Moore. And so this is absolutely about organizational capabilities and culture, thinking about business processes. Where are you, where should you be focusing
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TB: This crisis of prioritization. What are the things you need to be doing in what order.
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TB: This gap is not going to get smaller, unless you think all the way through this life cycle of coming up with an idea testing it, making sure the organization and culture can support it. And then how do you get it out to your customers.
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TB: And this cross team collaboration. This is a new research that we've just done out of our state of marketing report and it shows that now we're starting to see
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TB: What getting sales commerce and service share metrics to get all of the individual contributors going in the same direction.
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TB: Mind you, it's much easier at the executive layer right the C suite is usually held to a similar metrics.
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TB: Or a bonus structure as you get further down the organization and becomes very individualized. And so they don't understand how their role actually plays a part
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TB: In the overall customer experience. So that requires the executive team to communicate really clearly on what is it that your people need to do
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TB: And why and how to deliver a much more compelling experience being much more customer led taking our products and surrounding them with the things that our customers actually want from us.
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TB: So the fastest way to get a customer to love your brand is to get your employees to love their job.
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TB: I know this may sound really basic, but to employee experience drives customer experience. If your employees are happy. They show up to work happy. They're going to serve your customers, they're going to go the extra mile.
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TB: You only have to look as far as someone like Zappos
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TB: They do amazing customer success and customer service and it's all about making sure that their people are happy, so they can deliver the best experiences they can to their customers.
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TB: Even during coven one of their customer service agents came up with the idea of
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TB: Let's just have a phone number in case, our customers just want to call and talk to somebody
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TB: Lots of people are isolated their home alone. Let's do this. And they announced it. And sure enough, people started calling and saying, Hey, I
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TB: I don't know what to do. My cat wants to go outside. I don't want to let him outside. What do I do crazy questions. But really, this was about letting employees feel like they had some say in what they got to do every day.
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TB: And how they could serve the customers come up with fun ideas, mind you, I understand that there's costs associated with this.
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TB: But it's about empowering your people to do what's right and what's best for your customers, while still satisfying what you need from them on a day to day basis. So for me.
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TB: Growth as a thinking game full stop, you can out think your competition, but the only way to do it is you have to begin with something called a beginner's mind.
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TB: Now I don't want you to forget everything you know don't flip the chessboard and say, I'm going to start from scratch. This is give yourself maybe 10 or 15% space in your thinking time
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TB: What could we be doing different let me go try and solve this problem. Let me go sit on the customer surgeons on customer service calls for an hour, so I can listen to what our customers are saying
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TB: Let me listen in on a sales call let me have the ability and the willingness to unlearn and relearn
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TB: What I need to be doing now, going forward, because what got us here is just not going to get us there. Listen to your customers and employees.
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TB: Do listening sessions, but our CEO Marc Benioff challenged the company last quarter to make 1 million connections.
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TB: 1 million connections with customers video email for his calls and we blew it out of the water. We did 1.5 so he came back and said, great. I'm glad you guys did that. So now go to 5 million this quarter.
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TB: It's about making sure you're touching base with customers.
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TB: With valuable insights and information. But ultimately, they want to feel that you care about them that you're empathetic about their situation.
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TB: So listening requires you to ask much better questions, becoming a master ask her is really, really important at this time.
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TB: don't chase your perceived competition. Look. Remember you are the only business that is you. You are the only one that has your context, your culture, your brand your products. Your people your history.
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TB: your values, your vision. All of those things are unique to you. So if you're going to
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TB: copy your competition, make sure that you make it your own.
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TB: Otherwise your customers are going to say, Look, all they're doing is they're just copying, you know, this other company over here and they're not doing a very good job at doing it.
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TB: You have to remember that is all about who you are, what your superpowers are in doubling down there.
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TB: Don't be afraid of technology. I know that that is, you know, a funny thing to be saying on at this particular conference sense you know we're we're
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TB: We're all here from a technology slant. But what I mean by that is, don't feel like it's going to replace your people remember this is the power of and
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TB: Technology and human that is what is the most important thing today, and then your differentiation is your mental model how you do it.
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TB: How you do it if you just copy what other people do. You're never going to nail the how they do it. That's what makes you all unique. So why do customers choose you over your competition.
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TB: How do you understand what that reason is asked people who chose not to go with you why they didn't
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TB: Understanding what that means means you can really shape. What is our mental model. How do we compete effectively with our current situation.
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TB: And then always always always rally around the customer.
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TB: You have to make sure that they are your true north. If your employees are satisfied, they will serve the customer, but you have to make sure your employees know who your customer is and what they want from them.
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TB: The end of the day, it starts with each of you have to empower each other, empower your teams as leaders inspire those around you to do what's best, not only for the company and your shareholders before your customers.
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TB: So if you'd like to continue to boost your growth IQ. Here's some research that we have, much of which I shared with you here today, you can get it@salesforce.com backslash research.
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TB: I'd love to have you subscribe. And listen in to my what's next with Tiffani boba podcast. It's on all your favorite streaming platforms. And then my book growth IQ.
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TB: Which is now just celebrated its second year. It's in nine languages. It's been traveling around the world without me. At this point, but I've been thrilled with the response.
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TB: So I'm going to wrap up here and thank you and I'm going to welcome back Dario so we're going to have a little Q&A.
Q&A with Dario Ambrosini, CMO, Propel
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Dario Ambrosini: Alright, Tiffani. Thank you so much, really, really appreciate you walking us through that I learned a lot.
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DA: I got a little terrified on your slide where you talked about. We don't have a technology problem because like you. I work for a technology company but I get what you're saying. In terms of bringing together the people in the process.
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BA: I'd like to dig into that a little bit. Because when I think about having to take disparate departments and getting them aligned. I start thinking of things like analysis paralysis. How do you do it. It's such a daunting task.
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DA: How do you actually execute that. Is this something driven by the CEO. Is there a particular department that should lead. How do you, how do you heard all the cats here and get them moving in the same direction.
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TB: Yeah, great question. You know, often you'll hear the chief market or the marketing department owns customer experience.
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TB: I believe the entire company owns customer experience, but I understand the point that someone has to own sort of the metric and maybe the plan behind it.
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TB: So, whoever's responsible for the customer experience. So you might have a chief customer officer, you might have the chief marketing officer, you might have a customer success leader, whoever it may be, but I would suggest something like
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TB: Sharing meetings, sending executives and people from other teams to other team meetings.
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TB: Every quarter or every month. And you're rotating so that people have different perspectives and points of view. So that person could be a salesperson sitting in a marketing meeting or a customer service agent sitting in
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TB: a sales meeting and they go, well, that sounds good, but that's not what we do over here, it may uncover opportunity for improvement right on the process side.
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TB: And maybe look we actually do the same thing. Are you doing it, did you create a field in your system. We created a field in our system like maybe we just need one because the data is going into two different situations. Right.
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TB: So sometimes it's just allowing the conversation to happen. And so I like that kind of sharing team meetings, sitting in on calls as executives, I think, sitting in on the customer service.
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TB: Call Center is a huge way to learn what people actually think about your products and what's frustrating them.
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TB: And then between marketing and sales. I also believe that there's a lot around the conversation. Something as simple as, how do you define a marketing qualified lead
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DA: How do you define a sales qualified lead if those two definitions don't match, then that's why marketers say sellers never follow up on leads and sellers always say the marketing leads that gets sent to us are terrible.
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TB: So, you know, it's something as basic as getting people together. And once again, I don't mean the executives, right, because
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TB: That's not where we seem to see that siloed. It happens as you get lower lower in the organization because it becomes more and more of an individual
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TB: Contributor. And once that individual contributor is at the center of the conversations very hard for them to see around them.
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TB: The impact of the work to the overall sort of experience that a customer may have with the brand.
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TB: Okay, great, great. So once you get down to that level that individual contributor
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TB: They know that the customers want this seamless experience across all departments and you talked a little bit about what seemed like localization, the customer expect
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DA: Entrepreneur service to be tailored to their specific area, you know, somebody in Germany doesn't want the same experience as somebody in the US as somebody in China. So does this mean that
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DA: You know, the large companies doomed to become obsolete. Is there going to be a lot of fragmentation smaller companies tailoring to each individual market or can a large company do it all.
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TB: Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna I'm gonna push back a little.
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TB: Bit on what you just said. I don't know the answer if a customer in Germany doesn't want when a customer in China wants versus a customer in America wants. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, that goes back to that context.
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TB: Is that a true statement. If it's just an assumption you know customers in this other region. Don't want that from us. Okay. If somebody said that to me, I'd be like, excellent. What, tell me what the customer is actually said
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TB: That goes back to the going on listening to her right and asking
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TB: Because my gut would tell me after in my previous role, I was a research fellow a partner for a decade. And I can't tell you how many times I hear. We're different.
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TB: We're unique. There's no one else, like us, and sure enough, it's sort of the same five problems right or 10 problems, hence why I wrote the book Growth IQ.
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TB: Because I was like this is the fastest way for me to answer that question. But what what that says is about and I'm
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TB: Making up these numbers. Let's call it the 8020 rule.
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TB: 80% of everybody has the same challenges like right now outside sellers are now inside sellers. It's harder to the prospect like what's the right tone.
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TB: I'm going in and out of lockdown like every so that's 80% of what's feeling the same thing. The 20% is unique to oh but this particular region is open businesses are back coming online.
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TB: Where you're if you're in Australia, you know, Victoria shut that down. If you're selling and why they're back on the stage home order at the end of the day you know you've got some difference in that 20% but
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TB: I'd like to think that 80% of it is common. So
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TB: My, my, you know, point blank response to charter would be. That's the power of those listening towards asking the right questions, finding out that information and then making the right decision.
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TB: Because it may not be that it's decentralized right or there's a lot more fragmentation, it may be, you know what, we're a lot more consistent
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TB: And we're treating it like it's very different, which makes the experience words right versus treating it like you know what kind of all the same.
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TB: With a little bit of, you know, regional could be language.
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TB: Could be, you know, you don't do certain things or position certain things a certain way in certain regions, but you have to be respectful of that and that's that sort of 20% that you make.
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DA: Okay. Okay. Great. Great. So do you think about some of the predictive experiences to the predictive analysis, the AI that you do to try to figure out what the customer wants. Next, and not making assumptions. Like there's differences based on
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DA: Location country, things like that. What happens when you have a 2020 there's an unexpected endemic
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DA: wildfires in California. We're down to the Greek letters in storms on the on the East Coast like things are constantly changing.
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DA: How does that prediction. Well, let me rephrase it. What happens to that prediction. Once you have an unforeseen event. And how do you manage that from the customer experience.
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TB: Yeah, I would say this, you know, without a doubt, in my opinion. Anyway, this was a black swan event.
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TB: You could argue that people could say they knew it was going to happen. We just didn't know when, but you could say we know a big storms going to happen. We don't know when we know a big earthquake is going to happen. We just don't know when.
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TB: You know what I mean. So, but I feel like this was a black swan event. So that means that the muscle strength that an organization had around
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TB: Scrum teams or agile or communication or collaboration or working in in disparate system, you know, where
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TB: People are all over the place and
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TB: If you have those muscles worked out already entering something like this means you just have to accelerate and figure out how do we now do it in a remote environment. If we're not going to the office.
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TB: But if you didn't have those muscles drinks going into coded going into this pandemic into this black swan event it's far more challenging for you, right, because you don't have a culture that used to
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TB: asking those questions getting more predictive looking at the data, burning. What's the right decision for us to make
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TB: In real time but not. Not in real time. As I was saying, like, you don't make it doesn't changes and day right so real time doesn't mean like up to the minute
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TB: It means am I starting to see a pattern. Am I getting some signals that things are starting to change. Let me get ahead of that.
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TB: But once again, you know, this entire thing has cracked open the lack of investments on digital that many brands have made.
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TB: Which, of course, everyone's saying we've digitally transform more now in the last six months that we added the last, you know, six to 10 years, whatever it is.
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TB: That's because people were resisting doing it or didn't think it was the right time or didn't want to make that investment didn't understand the ROI and got caught when this happened.
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TB: The other side of it is that if you don't have a culture that is flexible.
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TB: You know, there's no silos right they're collaborating, they're working together your you already have the ability to reach out to customers, you have customer advisory boards, you have a listening tour, you have a collaborative platform.
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TB: All you're doing is, you know, doubling down on those investments, you've already made. And so the challenge here is is that if you haven't made them.
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TB: That's why we're seeing this acceleration of digital as people are catching up.
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TB: Those that have already digitally transform you see many doing much better than their counterparts have not made those investments. So I think that this is a
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TB: Realization that that investment in technology, especially as all these habits have changed.
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TB: I don't believe we're going to go back to the way that it was. I also don't believe we're going to stay where we are now, I believe we will have a next future which will look like a combination of the two. But I think it's up to us on what what that future is going to look like.
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DA: Great, great. So you talked a little bit about digital transformation that's something that this morning, Geoffrey Moore talked about you brought up the whole system of engagement.
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DA: And why that's important. And tomorrow morning brush Richardson. I know you. You're all familiar with his work, he's going to be talking about platforms.
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DA: And the importance of them. But when I think about how you worded it resonates the most with me. Maybe because I'm a marketer. But you talk about having to deliver this unified customer experience.
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DA: Is this whole concept behind, whether it's the system of engagement, the platform digital transformation is this just all about delivering that digital experience that you're talking about.
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DA: It is both for the employee, though, and for the customer, you know what
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TB: What I have started to say over the last couple years is we've got so fixated on customer experience. Look, I was guilty of it as well. I was part of the team.
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TB: At Gartner that made the predictions and the chief marketing officer would spend more than the Chief Information Officer and technology, about seven or eight years ago that sent off a flurry of acquisitions.
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TB: From you know Salesforce and Microsoft and Si P and Oracle everybody went out and bought trying to get that. And so, you know, I was
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TB: I was lucky enough right to be part of a team that was really pushing the envelope on this digital transformation conversation at customer experience being that new battleground that whole talk track.
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TB: Or what I feel. I did a disservice on was I left out that employee right and it's employee first and customer centric.
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TB: If it's customer first for all else that employees are not set up to succeed, right, if they have to log into 20 different tools to serve the customer that's not a great employee experience.
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TB: It slows them down and frustrates them, they're not able to give a great experience to the customer. The customer feels it so whose fault is that right, that's that sort of Sales Ops i t CIO right delivering these
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TB: more seamless and connected and integrated solutions for employees. So I feel like digitizing the back office modernizing the data center has been happening at the CIO layer for many, many years.
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TB: And the CMO stepped in and said, Hold on, I'm going to take some of this. It wasn't about search engine optimization or advertising online.
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TB: It was really about, they were building DevOps, they were creating apps. They were having UX designers
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TB: They were doing making investments in all kinds of technology and it was about getting that experience of the customer frontline layer to improve
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TB: Now, the trick is, how do you pull those two things together right that back office digitization
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TB: On the employee to the front office from a customer standpoint and marrying them and where that happens is in the employees, you know, realm of control right on their desktop on their phone on their laptop, whatever it is.
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TB: Or in their service truck, you know, with their iPad, whatever it might be, at the end of the day.
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TB: The moment of truth is when that employees in front of a customer in some way is trying to serve them and they're struggling to find out how to do that Boston. That's where that employee experience meets customer experience.
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DA: Perfect, perfect. So I'm going to wrap up here with growth IQ, which I keep handy I definitely love the book.
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DA: We're giving away some copies complimentary to conference attendees and I highly recommend that everybody who is listening in that they take us up on the offer.
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DA: But I want to finish with something you mentioned in the book you quote Bobby answer so I gotta thank you for bringing a racing car driver, which is my passion into a business book which I never thought I would see
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DA: In my lifetime, but you basically bring into where he talks about success being the preparation where preparation and opportunity need. Excuse me.
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DA: So as you think about companies that are thinking about the next black swan event. How do we keep customers happy. How do we stay on top of this experience what they should what should they be doing today to prepare for the next one.
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TB: Well, I mean, ultimately, this should be a masterclass in what you learned you had not invested in, and how do you make sure you balance the two things.
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TB: running the business transforming for the future. At the same time, and as an executive I called that the sellers dilemma.
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TB: I was playing on clay Christiansen Innovators Dilemma, which was, you know, as a seller, you're requiring me to hit numbers and now you're asking me to totally transform the way I sell I
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TB: Can't do both because if I don't get my numbers will be here in 18 months to take advantage of all the transformation of date.
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TB: If I'm too focused on transforming, I'm not taking care of the business. So, you know, at the end of the day, this is going back to that giving yourself some space.
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TB: So that when the opportunity presents itself. You're ready for it. You know, it's like an overnight success. Although, you've been doing things behind the scene for a really long time, you know, which we always hear
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TB: Or you know their self made, you know, rarely is anybody self pay, right. This is a team effort. This is pulling everybody together.
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TB: And making sure that everyone feels actually more comfortable and confident that if something comes their way again that you're going to be more prepared.
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TB: And so ultimately I think everybody should feel more prepared at this point you know whether you know i hope it doesn't happen again in our lifetime, but
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TB: It may happen in a regional or local right could be a storm could be a fire could be, you know, whatever it might be, might be regional or local or in a particular industry.
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TB: Like we had last time with the Great Recession here in the US it was financial services in real estate. This is global, everybody you know every industry really everyone
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TB: And so you know that that that kind of disruption. I hope doesn't happen, but every 100 years or so. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think this is about being more prepared thinking in a more agile, responsive way, you know, allowing people
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TB: To really show up and deliver whatever service, it is, but I think this is a time where opportunity is is a really
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TB: Key word in that in that statement that you made to Mario because look, not everybody has the opportunity to do the things we get to do every day.
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TB: And so giving everybody the opportunity to try to solve these problems take ideas from all over your organization give people an opportunity to move up based on how they perform during this time.
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TB: If the worst possibility, like, you've got to give people sort of the room to grow and breathe as well. And I think that's super important. And I think during this time.
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TB: You will have seen lots of skills and resilience from people you maybe didn't expect. And so I think it's a good time to reward that
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DA: Well, thank you. I think this is a perfect way to end day one of propulsion Tiffani Bova thank you so much for joining us today.
TB: Thank you for having me. Thank you, everybody.
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