Latest / From Stalled to Scaling / The Questions Worth Asking
Transcript
- Jim Tincher, HoC: The best customer programs I know are asking fewer questions this year than they asked last year, on purpose. That sounds backwards until you look at what most of those questions are doing for you. 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. This research comes for the research behind my book, Do B2B Better. Of the four actions of that book, this is from the section called Evaluate the Flywheel. So for the data, start with the arithmetic. Roughly 5% of your customers fill out your survey, and the executives inside those accounts almost never do. So the people answering are not a small version of your customer base, they're a different group and using them to describe everybody. Meanwhile, every single one of your customers is telling you something every month. They're talking to you with their orders. They order patterns, whether they're buying more lines of product from you or fewer, a service calls, how long you took. Quote to order rate. None of that needs a new system. Because all of it sits in your systems right now. Here's the truth. As programs mature, the best ones actually eliminate some of their own surveys. If your survey doesn't predict anything about customers ordering or growth, asking is just creating noise. You're creating a tax for your customers just so that you have a number on your dashboard. Behavior gets you closer to money than any score does. The survey has a role, it tells you why, but the behavior is the key and the operations behind that. Let's say an account that used to buy six of your product lines now buys four. Now they've told you something. And nobody had to fill out anything on a survey. The same goes for the gaps between orders getting longer or a quote request that used to come every quarter. And now doesn't. Now, one more thing is worth saying out loud. The customers who answer surveys are usually the ones who already like you enough to spend 15 minutes on your behalf, or the ones super frustrated, they're giving you feedback hoping you'll listen. That's exactly the wrong sample of finding an account that's about to grow or shrink. You need to go broader. Sam Wegman ran customer experience at Univar Solutions, actually still does. At that point, the largest chemical distributor in North America. At my first Do B2B Better conference, she walked through how she connected operational and behavioral data together and then matched it up with survey data. She looked at data such as product availability and complaints, and then she used the combination to predict what customers were about to do, to predict rather than to explain the behaviors after the fact. That's the difference between. Passive dashboard and an instrument. And it's the difference between finding out in the review and finding it out before it hits your order book. Now our inputs were not exotic. Availability is the biggest one, which I often see in manufacturing distribution. Simply, if a customer wants three train loads of a product on December 1st, can you say yes or no? It's that simple. But it's also that powerful. Availability means whether the customer could get what they needed when they said they needed it. Others include complaint history, ordinary operational facts that every distributor already has, and most never point at a customer question. Her skill wasn't in the data, although let's be frank, there was a lot of skill there too. But it was in deciding which customer outcome the data was supposed to explain before she went and got it. Now I'll be straight about why this is rare, because it's not a technology problem. You know, often do I talk about this? Companies will tell me, it's so hard to get the data. Well, it's hard to get perfect data, but ordering data is usually pretty easy. So getting three years of ordering data out of a company is a political problem, if anything. That data belongs to somebody who has no particular reason to hand it to you, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anybody. That's one way to look at subtract first. So cut out a question nobody can defend, costs you no permission at all, and it gives you something to trade with. So when you're talking to the people on the data, walk in that conversation, already cut half of your own questions. And so you're not the person asking for more. You're just the person who made the reporting shorter. Every question you kill buys back attention from a customer who's already tired of being asked. So that brings us to Tinture Truth number 29. As programs mature, the best ones eliminate some of their own surveys. The goal was never to have more surveys. The goal is to understand what drives customers to grow and act on it. By combining the survey data with ordering data, for example, you can identify what in your survey. Actually matters. And then you can focus on that, eliminating the rest. So here's your assignment. It takes an afternoon. Print every question you currently ask your customers. All of them. Your transactional surveys, your relationship surveys, your surveys at the bottom, somebody's email, all of them on one page. And you might have to get it down to 4.5 to get there. And that alone tells you something. Now cross out Every question where nobody in your company can tell you what decision changes based on the answer. Count what's left. That's your real measurement program. And it's a shorter and better one than the one you've been funding. Knowing the right number and getting able to act on it are two completely different problems, and only one of them is about data. You can find the full research at heart of the customer.com and as well, really in I booked Do B2B Better, there's also a summary of the findings at my blog at heart of the customer.com slash blog. So lastly, the ask for you. I want your feedback. What did this episode landed? What didn't? What should you take on? What should I take on next? And lastly, how many of your questions actually survive this analysis? Email me at gym at heart of the customer.com.