Latest / From Stalled to Scaling / Annoyed or Unemployed
Transcript
- Jim Tincher, HoC: If you buy a bad phone, you'll be annoyed for three years. If one of your customers recommends the wrong supplier, they could be unemployed for three years. Same bad purchase, completely different stakes. And that difference decides whether your accounts grow with you or quietly stop. I'm Jim Tincher, and this is From Stalled to Scaling. Eight minute ideas for B2B leaders on growing to the customers they already have. And let's start with what should be obvious, but doesn't seem to be. B2B is simply different from B2C. I spent six years at Best Buy. And let me tell you about a revelation we had that felt enormous at the time. We just received some new research and we discovered something that'll blow your mind. Sometimes, like for example, when somebody's buying a computer. There's not just one person in the decision. There are two. Like a husband and a wife, a son and his mom. Two decision makers. And it blew our minds. And of course it did, because in retail, that's the hard version of the problem. You sell to a person and you measure whether that person comes back again in a month. You run a hotel, you measure where they book again. Clean question, clean answer. And that's the nature of B to C. Now hold that next to your world in B2B. You would love it if you only had two decision makers to worry about, because Gardner tells us that a typical buying group for a B2B solution runs from six to ten decision makers. And more recent work says it can go as high as 16 if it's complicated. So you're not selling to a person or a couple, you're selling to a football team. That never sits in one room, and most of whom we've never spoken to. That changes the conversation. It's very different than it is in B2C. Let me give an example. I've used Samsung phones for at least a dozen years now. So we switched carriers and I got a new phone for free. I took the newest Samsung. Top of the line, faster, better memory, brand new. I mean, come on, why wouldn't I? And I was excited about the new purchase for about 15 minutes. Because I'm also a heavy Google Maps user. Fifteen minutes after the purchase, I got in my car to head for the airport, plugged the phone in, and Google Maps didn't work. Somewhere between my car and the phone, the new model broke Google Maps. It works about half the time now. Now I'm a consumer. Nobody at Samsung is losing sleep because Jim Tincher in Minneapolis is frustrated by we broke Google Maps. They don't know about it, and yeah, I'm sure they care, but I'm just one in a billion. Now let's flip it. Let's say instead I work at a manufacturer, maybe even Samsung. So I work at Samsung and I buy chips. I recommend a supplier and we design those chips into a product and they work about half the time. I'm not annoyed for three years. I'm unemployed for three years because everybody in that building knows whose recommendation it was and who broke things. That's the biggest difference between B2B and B2C. Get it right, and your buyer's the person who found you. And they may be a little bit of a hero. But get it wrong and they own the failure by themselves. And they wouldn't be the first people who lost their jobs because they made the wrong purchase or the wrong choice of suppliers. And that's why so many customer decisions look irrational from your side of the table. They're not irrational. Customer is protecting somebody, and maybe if somebody never met. And that person is them. It's also why we ask the questions we ask are the wrong ones. So we're still trying to measure these relationships with hand-me-down some retail. Are you satisfied? Would you recommend us? Those questions were built for somebody choosing a hotel where the worst-case scenario is a bad weekend. Nobody's career is on the line. in a hotel. Ask a satisfied buyer whether you made them look smart to their boss, you get a completely different answer. And that answer, as well as others like, do they feel confident about you? Do they feel like a valued customer? Those answers change before the orders do, which makes them a leading indicator. And so you can get it without a survey, a budget, or anybody's permission. Surveys work well, but there are other ways too. That's the bet this whole show runs on. You want growth out of the customers you have. What almost nobody understands is that that relationship is measurable. That instead of starting with what everybody else does, net promoter score, customer satisfaction, and using that to measure relationships, which doesn't work, and therefore they don't predict anything, let's start with what's proven to work. That's what you'll be learning about in this podcast. We have over 800 interviews with B2B growth customers. 10,000 interviews or surveys. We've got the data, and we're going to walk through this together to understand how you can create that leading indicator you need to predict the growth that you've signed up. Let's end with the tinsure truth number one hundred and eight. B2B customers don't just buy your product. They stake their career on you. A satisfaction score can't see that, but this is where your growth gets decided. And we're going to end every episode with an assignment. So here's the one for today. Go back to those two numbers you picked from the last podcast. And pick one account that you would have called healthy but wasn't growing. Write down every person who touched the last real buying decision at that account at your customer. Not the org chart, who was actually involved with the decision. Probably have to interview to get that there. Then put a mark next to every name your team has never met and count the marks. That count is your shortest list of the new conversations that you need to have. And every name on it is somebody who can say yes to more of your business or no. Again, my name is Jim Tinger, and you can see the full research at heart of the customer.com. And so tell me, what resonated? I want your feedback. What landed, what didn't, what should I take on next, and how many marks do you count? Email me at Jim at Heart of the Customer.