Latest / From Stalled to Scaling / Where the Handoff Breaks
Transcript
- Jim Tincher, HoC: I've watched companies find exactly the right number to measure customers in a way that can predict growth. Prove it, put in a good report, and change nothing at all. Because finding the number, while it's hard, it's not the most challenging part. What's most challenging is that your customers' experience is produced by people who don't work for you. I'm Jim Tincher, and this is From Stall to Scaling. Eight-minute ideas for B2B leaders on growing through the customers you already have. Now, this comes from research behind my book, Do B2B Better. In that book, I identified four actions. Essentially, identify the data that matters, the outcome that matters, customers who buy more from you, for example. Nextly, to measure the emotions that drive those behaviors your executives care about. Third is integrate your operations and behavioral data into your analysis. And the fourth, I called grease the flywheel, change management. And it's the one that decides whether the other three were worth doing. While researching for the book, I interviewed hundreds of leaders and asked what blocks them. I also surveyed hundreds more. The answer came back as really a three-way tie. I expected one to stick out, it didn't. It was a three-way tie. Organizational complexity. Not having enough of the right people. And no buy-in from leadership. Organizational complexity clearly makes sense. Is that trying to track what's happening and get the organization to move, that's hard. Not having enough of the right people means that you don't have the resources necessary to do the analysis or drive the change, and then no buy-in from leadership. So the idea goes nowhere. Those three are highly related, but if we look at the list, the thing to keep in mind is that not one of those is an analysis problem. They're all change problems. And that's a critical skill for a growth leader. If you want to drive your company to do better for your customers, your customers will buy more from you. That requires strong change management. Here's where that shows up: sales, supply chain, quality. The people who send the invoice. Each of them owns a piece of the experience. And everyone has a scorecard that doesn't mention the customer experience. Now that's the truth this episode runs on. Almost every journey crosses department boundaries. The handoff between departments is where trust goes to die. So the question is not whether people agree with you. Yeah, most of them will. Question is whether India's actual job changes on Tuesday, and nobody's job changes because report said so. That requires change management and executive buy-in. Let me give you an example of a customer of ours who figured this out. Lori Englert. She's the CMO, North American CMO at LeGrand, and she was on episode one. I've known Lori for 15 years now. And she's told me the story that I think about constantly. Now she ran marketing for Le Grand, or before LeGrand, it was with another organization who she ran their marketing. Then she moved over to customer experience. Now, of course, she's in charge of marketing again. When she was in marketing, every year her boss would ask her what big idea she had. So she'd go back to her desk, do some research, talk to her co-workers, come up with something. But didn't ask customers. That's what she said. One year, The big idea was to create tool that let customers design their own A V racks online and order them. So an AV rack, you know, it's a rack that holds different kinds of equipment in it. That's what one of the things LeGran does. And so they're going to create a configurator to let them build it online. Complex project costs a lot of money. A year later, they looked at it and said, nobody's using it. So she went out and asked why. She talked to a number of different customers, and one guy summed it up for her. He said, I don't need a tool. Building racks is what I do. Yeah, I like your configurator. I just use it to check my work. But I'm not ordering through your site anyway because I changed things on the fly. So since this is what I do, I don't really use your configurator to order. So Laurie said, Wow, imagine how much money I would have saved if I'd asked first. That story is where her whole approach changed. And I still vividly remember doing interviews with the LeGrand team. And it blew me away because everybody we talked to, we talked to seven people, I think, and everyone had specific examples of talking to a customer, not in the last year, not in the last six months, in the last week. And that became part of the culture. She built change management and built the need to talk to customers in the culture. But the part worth copying is what comes next, because it wasn't about customers at all. Once she built this capability, she ran the same process internally using design thinking. She asked employees how would they make the company the healthiest one they ever worked for? She listened, built prototypes, tested them, and then shipped it, came back. A healthy food option, yoga, a bike club, so she could test it out as it worked. And so she used design thinking internally to build up the buy-in. Her line is that employees then knew they were serious or knew she was serious. She listened, followed through, and after that, people wanted in. So that's a mechanism. And she earned the right to change how other departments worked by proving the method on something they cared about first their culture. Her divisional president now, and I interviewed him separately. He told me that when somebody brings me an idea, I ask them first, how many customers have you talked to? They haven't talked to very many or none at all? I send them right back and come back after you have. So why does this fall to you? Everybody wants a mandate for the top. Obviously they do. And when you get one, that helps. And you definitely want it. But a mandate produces compliance. What you need is for a supply chain manager to make a different call on a decision she makes 40 times a week. Nobody complies their way to that change. She has to see what it does to a customer she can picture and how it helps her be successful. That's a conversation, not an analysis. It's also the part that decides with the first three efforts connecting to financials, measuring emotions, bringing the operational and operational, financial, and behavioral data, whether that earned anything. It's also the cheapest of the four. So tintured truth number 104. Most journeys cross department boundaries. The handoff between departments is where trust goes to die. Here's your assignment, and it's simply one name. Take the number you're accountable for, we've shared in the past, and name the one department whose handoffs affect it the most. One. Not a list, just one. Then book 30 minutes with the person who runs it and bring one item, what your customer said about their part of the work, in the customer's own words. Ask them what they need in order to change one decision. In my experience, the answer is usually something small that nobody ever thought to ask them for. Start small. get approval to go big. You learn all this in the research at well heart of the customer dot com. I've got a blog post on this, but also from Do Be To Be Better, where it goes in more detail. So your feedback. I want your feedback. What landed? What didn't? What should I take on next? And which department did you pick? Email me. Jim at heart of the customer dot com.