Latest / From Stalled to Scaling / Growth Leader Interview: Laurie Englert
Transcript
- Jim Tincher, HoC: What does a real growth leader do to drive share of walled expansion with her clients? Today you'll learn from Laurie Englert, North American CMO for Legrand, how she leads her organization to growth. Welcome to From Stalled to Scaling, the podcast and video series for B2B growth leaders, to show how you can grow your share of wallet. My name's Jim Tincher. I'm the CEO at Heart of the Customer, as well as the author of Do B2B Better. And when I started this series, I thought, who do I want for my first guest? It didn't take any time. I knew immediately I wanted Laurie Englert. Now, Laurie and I have known each other for fifteen years now, even before Heart of the Customer started, it's fourteen years old, when she saw saw me speak at at a American Marketing Association meeting back here in Minneapolis. So Laurie, welcome and tell everybody about yourself. Laurie Englert: Sure. So thanks, Jim. Yes, we've known each other for a long time. And I will tell you that you are the one person that got me the most excited about customer experience. Because when I called you to help us at that point for a very high level customer satisfaction initiative, you gave up your time freely to share because you were so passionate about it. So I think your passion has developed into my passion. So I'm currently at Legrand as a CMO, but I came through acquisition. So I came from a company called Milestone at the time, and we had just been starting to embark on the customer experience. So I was traditionally I was in marketing, led the marketing teams, and then once we started to really wrap our arms around customer experience and what it meant to our growth and how we were changing customer behavior. I became the VP of customer experience, which blew my mind. To be honest with you, I realized I love marketing, but what I really enjoyed and really became so confident about was a customer experience. A big design thinker, discovering what empathy and behaviors do to result to growth is where I thrive. It absolutely made me more confident as a marketer once I had customer input to develop my goals to make sure I'm fixing the biggest priority needs now. So from VP in customer experience, I got this great opportunity to not only run the cross-divisional customer experience team within the cloud, but then they asked me if I'd be willing to put my hat in the ring for this CMO role. So as you can imagine, I am now in the process of figuring out how might we get more customer empathy, enablements, all those things into our current playbook across the entire Legrand organization. Jim Tincher, HoC: What I love about the introduction, a lot of things. One is first of all, focusing on behavior. You all probably heard her say behavior a couple of times. What you did not hear her say are net promoter score, customer satisfaction, surveys. She talked more about how do we change customers' behaviors through a better customer experience, which is what this series is all about. And you know, I had Laurie, she had mentioned her in Do B2BER, she's a case study in there. When I had the Do B2B Better Conference, the first one, I had Laurie speak there, and she's the one everybody remembered. So that's why I'm pumped to be here. Quickly let people know who Legrand is too, and then we'll get into our questions. Laurie Englert: Sure. So Legrand is multi-billion dollar company and we sell infrastructure products. So if you have light switches in your house called the Dorn, we sell those. If you have TV mounts, if you have a screen in your school, if you need lighting controls, right? We're also big in the data center business. So we we make the equipment that actually powers up a lot of the the displays within data centers. So very cool growth oriented business. Obviously with data center that's big now, growing even more, taking on some of that and evolving in such a way because part of our core focus area is definitely keeping our customers happy. So big infrastructure company with great ambitions. We're a French owned company. We are the the North American region, if you will, of that of the company. So and nearly almost half of them now in terms of dollars. Jim Tincher, HoC: So a number of people listening are going to be in the work field of marketing, CMOs like yourself, as well as customer experience. And I know they believe what I'm about to ask you next, but help give them more background, give them more content to talk with. So organizations can grow different ways. Kind of the big three are marketing for new customers, new logos. There's acquiring new companies, or what we talk Laurie Englert: Mm-hmm. Jim Tincher, HoC: about here, which is growing through your existing customers, which Gartner Laurie Englert: Uh-huh. Jim Tincher, HoC: and Forester both found is really where most growth typically comes from in B2B. Laurie Englert: Mm-hmm. Jim Tincher, HoC: Why should companies focus on growing existing customers instead of chasing the new logos? Laurie Englert: cheaper. They're already a customer. They want to buy your stuff. So why not focus in on making them so happy they want to buy more? Right? So we know, for example, that just by implementing our self-service engine on one of our AD businesses where I came from. Our customers were happy, happier because they could see their results faster, they could get their returns notification, they could do all the things you like to do on Amazon, right? So when we do things like that for customers, they want to stay with you longer. And then as a result of that, you look for ways to get them to buy more, right? So if we're actually making a good self-service experience, we definitely then need to look to Well, that's great. Seems like they're buying, you know, three of the ten products in this category. How might we get them to think about those additional products? Right? Jim Tincher, HoC: And the you've listeners probably also pick up on the how might we? And Laurie mentioned earlier, she's a big design thinker, which is part of her approach to this. something you've been working on that's maybe counterintuitive, but is probably a lot of people are all behind it. You've done a lot of work in the digital space as a way to really knock down barriers for your clients. Can you share more about that? Laurie Englert: Yes, so when I took this role three years ago now, one of the biggest things that was concerning to me, because we are an MA company. Like I mean, it's been pretty much just within our North American region two to three a year lately, right? Because business is growing. So I was saddled with 19 websites, 16 ERPs, 9 key platforms, because As they come in and grow, we are not getting rid of the tech debt. We've got all these disparate websites everywhere, and we have to figure out how to come together, not only to save that tech debt and be more efficient, but to give a better customer experience, right? So we have four distinct divisions that sell to completely different markets. Yet When a customer comes in and they want to know what LeBron sells, there's much more opportunity if we could align all those customers, because we now are starting to see lots of crossover in customers among our divisions. So we need to align that in such a way that regardless of what division you're on, if you want to say, for example, We sell A products, like I told you, TV mounts, TV screens, all that kind of stuff that goes into let's take a school, right? Well, our lighting and controls division sells all those lighting controls to make the shades go up and down and to make sure that your lights go off when the sun comes up, all those things. If you're a customer, if you're an integrator, if you're someone that is specifying those products, you might go, hey. I didn't know you had lighting controls and you wouldn't know because we were all these disparate websites. Now what we're doing, we're in the throes of bringing those all together under a united platform, united navigation system, but still giving them to the autonomy for the brands they want to keep in their own nested site. So if a specifier, for example, wants to go in to one of our websites. And he just cares about that because he only does business with that one. He wants to be efficient. He can do that. But he can also navigate out and now see what we have around the entire company. We won't have that much for another year, but we are working diligently to make that happen. Jim Tincher, HoC: Love it. And you know, I wrote about a lot about this and do B2B Better, where the the key financial metric for a lot of organizations are really how do we grow existing accounts? Whether that's debt revenue retention, whether that's margin per customer, different ways to measure it. And what I found is that accomplishing that goal, if you want them to go from one division to another, you have to have a really solid experience in the first division before they'll trust you with the second. Have you found that? Laurie Englert: Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's that's definitely the case. And I think in general, people love their sales reps, right? So they tend to go to their sales reps to get the answers. So we also have a sales effectiveness team where even though we have different divisions, when we have these very big large projects like say a an entire school or a university. Now they will talk to one key point of contact but can access all these other divisions. So it's definitely this thought process of we have the opportunity to scale up faster with these customers by offering them more and we're aligned from a sales perspective that we they get a good experience, the experience that they would want to have. Because if you kept that two separate, that's gonna be hard. Right. Because one division might act completely different than the other division, but you want to be able to align that experience the best you can, right? Jim Tincher, HoC: I love that example. I was actually in, I haven't told you this. I was in Raleigh last month. I was conducting a customer interview. I love doing that. And it was a utility. And I was talk, I was representing one division. As we were talking, the client asked, now which division are you here for? For my client. And halfway through the conversation, he stopped me, pulled out his phone, and said, How many different brands are under your company? And he discovered that he had six or seven different brands for the same company he was working with. With six or seven sales reps who didn't know each other or never talked to each other. So it Laurie Englert: Yes. Jim Tincher, HoC: sounds like you're really working to prevent that similar challenge at Lagrange. Laurie Englert: Yep, a hundred percent. Yeah, it's a work in progress, you know, again, because we do sell to different customers, but we're trying to figure out from a central perspective how do we align these in such a way we've got big customers, right? And so they have different needs. I did a whenever again, big design thinker, whenever I do a presentation for a division like sometimes they'll say hey can you come to our sales meeting and talk about the website and talk about things you're doing and the things you need from us sure absolutely I I always call like ten salespeople and I'll say what is it you want to know like what are the key things and the big topic was a website because we were working on it and I And so I would then I dug deeper and I started asking, well, when you go to a website and you know we have these multiple brands, what do your customers ask for? I always want to know what's new. What's new at Legrand? Where do you have it? Right now, they think what's new is just within that division of electrical infrastructure products. In fact, what's new, that sales rep wants to know. How can I get involved with lighting and controls to help sell more to this customer? I want to give them that opportunity because that customer is looking at me going, Hey, I didn't know you had those products. How can I get those products? Help me sell, right? So it starts to come full circle when we keep thinking we're in our own division. Their customers are asking us. Hey, what else is new? How can you help me grow my portfolio? How can you help me grow my business with my customer? That's our job. How do we get in deeper? We do that through our website. We do that through our salespeople. My job is to go when I'm talking to them and dig out the information and figure out how we can help you do that so we all grow together, right? Jim Tincher, HoC: That's great example. It really broadens the definition of what customer experience is. It's not some survey, it's how do we design what we do so that customers can buy more from us. Laurie Englert: Yes, absolutely. Jim Tincher, HoC: So despite your efforts, I'm sure not every client is growing with you. What's true of those customers that do grow with you? Do you have any kind of leading indicators or what do you know about customers who are willing to grow with you and who are doing it actively? Laurie Englert: I would say now again because did a lot of work even on the trade show floors where we would bring in a a really crappy mount and we would hang it on the wall and we would put this whole sheet over it, right? And then we would have our customers sign an NDA to come in because we look for feedback. Now this was a big menu board mount. So those things you see in McDonald's and whatever at the top where you're picking what food you want. Right? So we put it in there. Customer signed Sandier. By the way, they feel extremely important when they do that because they're having an impact on what now they can sell. Right? So they come in and they look at this and they go, my god, that's a junk, that's kind of junky. I'm not sure what to do with that. you yeah, this is for the menu board. I got five in a row. This needs some sort of pop-up button so that so that I can get under there and fix it if it goes down, right? So customers start telling you all the cool things that they want in this mount because you gave them access to what you're trying to build for them. Keep in mind people pay fifty thousand dollars for a focus group. I'm at a trade show getting this for free. Right? But the most important, I still run into the Those customers who this day and you know what they say to me? yeah, I I helped build that product. That was part of mine. I gave input, right? We made them feel valuable. Not only that, the other thing we'll do then is go, by the way, for our website, we have this council where we ask people constantly, Hey, what do you think about this feature? We're we're trying to do this. And they're now part of that council. And they feel embedded in our company because we're embedded in their success, right? So all those customers are loyal because they have a position. When they call and say, man, I need a little string under that mounts so it pops out because it'll save my guy time to install it. They know we're gonna go, yeah, it's great. What else do you need? What else can I help you with to make sure that you're you're doing that for your customers, right? Jim Tincher, HoC: So really giving your customers Laurie Englert: Yeah. Jim Tincher, HoC: a sense of ownership. Laurie Englert: Hundred percent. Hundred percent. And we can't do it without them. I'll tell you, I did a whole, and this was years ago, but we wanted what's called a rack builder, right? A rack builder. And we wanted a customer to go in, log it into the website, figure out what they need, and we're gonna wire that all the way through the manufacturing process. We're gonna build it for them. We're gonna do all those things. They're gonna love it. We never asked one customer. Not one customer. We thought that was a really good idea. So then once we started down this design thinking journey and trying to figure out why is this not working? I go in, you guys, it took me five interviews. That was it. And you know what all those rack builders told me? That's who I am. Like I build those racks. I don't want you building it for me. Why would I do that? Yeah, you're saving me time, but don't you understand what goes into building a rack and some of have this and some of have that and some of want it this way and that way. And that's the value I Boy, did we miss the mark? But once we figured out we don't do that anymore, every time we build a product, we have those interviews with customers. And I just did this whole website thing. Customers from every division. And guess what? Their needs are pretty much the same. But we listen to every of them. They'll all have their nuances. So we don't lose sight of their brand and what they're known for. But they're gonna get what they want, right? Jim Tincher, HoC: For those listeners here and viewers, back if we go back five years ago when I was writing Do B2B Better, I interviewed Laurie's team. And it led to a blog post of the fictional customer experience CX leader. And the reason was what really struck me about Laurie's team was they all talked about having a conversation with the customer in the last week or two. Every one of them. Whereas when I did 200 interviews with different customer experience leaders, And marketing leaders, what I found is that very few of them had talked to a client in the last six months. And so that's what's one of the big differences Laurie brings, not just herself, but her whole team, they swim in customer feedback because they ask for. Laurie Englert: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Jim Tincher, HoC: Well yeah, just what I'm what I'm looking for is when I did I interviewed thirty-four C suite leaders and what I found that they're all focused on growth. That's not a shock, hence hence the name of this podcast, From Stalled to Scaling. But they're looking for leading indicators as well. Something that tells them whether they're going to do well in the future or lacking, and very few have them. And I don't know if you have anything that tells you these accounts are at risk, we got to really focus on them, or these accounts are a really great opportunity to scale. Laurie Englert: Mm-hmm. Well, I would say, and and granted, now I'm in the the corporate, the more central area. So I our divisions do that for sure, 100%. I mean, they've got large sales teams that focus on, hey, what's growing, what's not growing, do we need to pivot? Whatever those things are. but those from from a customer experience standpoint, I would say those divisions that sales people that are close enough to their customers will go out and ask, hey, what's going on? You know, why are we going up? Why are we going down? You know, so they're more intertwined in that. And then as their their marketing partner, that's where I would lean in and we would start to dive in and figure out how do we need to grow. So for example in A V, we did a plus one. It's like, hey, our customers are kind of stagnant. They seem to love our products. You know, maybe we're not doing a good enough job telling them about our other products. So we gave the sales team basically a a plea pitch to go, okay, this year we're gonna have a plus one strategy. And it's like you go in, try to sell amount, but why not sell, you know, screens with it. And then we'd incentivize them to do it, but then our customer also got to learn about the product. So that was just kind of one scenario where we go, hey, everybody they're kind of stagnant. How might we grow them a bit? And therefore we just, you know, you put something together that's a plus one strategy or something. And it was wildly successful. I think and I've been gone to fear that they still do that today. Jim Tincher, HoC: So you don't know this, but I talk about you a lot. And Laurie Englert: nice. Jim Tincher, HoC: you mentioned that plus one at conference. And one thing I often say so, share of wallet is a common term in B2B. And for those not familiar with it, if your customer using Laurie's example, they spend a million dollars a year in mounts. What percentage of that do you get? That's the share of wallet. And every B2B leader is really interested in increasing share of wallet, but none of them can actually measure it. Like Legrand does Legrand doesn't usually know that a cuss company spent a million dollars in mounts. They just know you got this amount. And when we Laurie Englert: Yeah. Jim Tincher, HoC: did that survey together, we asked customers how much they spent. So we asked customers about the share of wallet. And we checked with your team and says it's pretty good. But one of the items I love is that I've adopted this really as a way to measure share of wallet, is a plus one. And what I mean by that is many of our larger clients might have Four or five or six different product lines that a customer could buy. And one way of measuring customer experience, the impact of it, is when your customer experience gets better, are your customers jumping to another division? Are they adding that plus one? If they're doing mounts today, are they adding screens? If they're doing mounts and screens, are they adding cameras for you? And so Laurie Englert: Mm-hmm. Right. Jim Tincher, HoC: that's a great way for those out there who are looking. How do I connect to my executives? If you can show That certain elements of your customer experience lead customers to do the plus one. That's a great way of showing your executives why focusing existing customers is a really effective way to drive growth. Laurie Englert: Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, I'll give you an example too, just a very high level example, which is current. data centers are exploding, right? Absolutely exploding. And we have a very, very big customer out there that one of the sales reps went in and they said, Hey, I'd like to get on a monthly cadence with you. And customer said, Well, we're only buying one of your products, everything's going great. It's a great product. We use it all the time. I don't have time to just meet with you about one product. Now, if we were selling more of your products, then that would denote a meeting that we could have regularly to discuss the options. And that really got the president of that division going, man, they see us as a just a a one-trick pony if you will versus somebody that can add holistically to their portfolio so now and he's been thinking about this anyway it's like well how do we move from that one to a solution focus so that we can get in deeper with our customers who already value our relationship they know we do a good job it's to the point and I think I said this way back when The feedback I would always get from customers is the best manufacturer is the one I never have to pick up the phone and call. So they just want it to run smoothly and go, go, go, right? So we kind of live by that where it's like, okay, let's make it so easy, they don't want to call us. But on the other hand, we want to be in there more. So it became kind of one of these, that's a great problem to solve that we're solving this, but We need to offer them more so that we can be more part of sitting at the table now. Like now we're we're not just them, we're part of their team. And that's what we strive to do now. So we're kind of going from this, yeah, self-service, but how might we get in the trenches with you to help you solve your problems and not just be known because we have one good product? Jim Tincher, HoC: That's a great point. I was doing another interview this time in the city of Phoenix, and the client began by saying, I love your client. I don't they're the one company I don't have to think about. And that sounds Laurie Englert: Mm-hmm. Jim Tincher, HoC: really good, but sometimes they don't they say they don't have to think about you. That's not a good thing, that's a warning. In this case, they weren't growing at all because they Laurie Englert: Yep. Yeah. Jim Tincher, HoC: weren't thinking about it. And as I Laurie Englert: Yeah. Jim Tincher, HoC: got deeper into it, I learned this guy, call him Bob, loves to learn, and he was learning from everybody. Except my client, because they were the company Laurie Englert: Yeah. Jim Tincher, HoC: you didn't have to think about and therefore they weren't growing. Laurie Englert: Exactly. Yeah, you don't wanna lose sight. You don't wanna just be dependent on the fact that, yeah, they're a great customer, they're we you know, we get their business, but they didn't make the top of the spreadsheet on what the line was. So they're stuck in the middle there and we d we're not paying attention, right? Jim Tincher, HoC: Right. So for the listeners out there, Laurie is also one of the technical editors for my forthcoming book, also called From Stalled to Scaling. Now don't get too excited, it won't be out to first quarter. But when we talked about that, Laurie, we had a fight and it was fun about satisfaction. So tell me your thoughts about satisfaction. And let's let's have a little bit of fight here for the listeners. Laurie Englert: Sure. So our company does it does an annual customer satisfaction survey. And using the survey, we build journey maps. And using the journey maps, we find where our biggest cliffs are and we go after those because we know they're a customer pain point. Now, and I know Jim and you and I agree, surveys aren't the whole answer. It's what you do with the survey. But I also believe like grounding yourself on something. Our company thinks about CSAT. We do. And it is a way to connect people across the organization that go, hey, our CSAT score for digital right now is 71. That's pretty good. That's Apple like. Or we have some of those websites that are 48. Lots of work to do. So it gives us this basis to have a conversation. I wouldn't say surveys are the end all. I'd rather go talk to a bunch of customers, but they're a good data point and they're a good way for people to understand across a company that may not be as focused on sales or growth or whatever, but they know that that score says we're either doing a good job or we're improving to do a great job. Jim Tincher, HoC: My perspective is just we've we've looked at recently looked at 800 plus B2B interviews and also looked at the Advanced Manufacturing CX Consortium, which had 10,000 surveys, and we found in those satisfaction, yep, it will identify who's not satisfied and they're at risk. But Laurie Englert: Mm-hmm. Jim Tincher, HoC: my viewpoint is that if you want to show, if you want to show who's likely to grow, it's more about Laurie Englert: Mm-hmm. Jim Tincher, HoC: confidence. It's more about feeling valued. And in that AMCX survey, and you can get that in that white paper at heart of the customer.com, we found that 81% of customers were satisfied, only 27% plan to grow. It's a huge gap between those, but the best predictor of who's going to grow is the feel like a valued customer. So we go on a lot Laurie Englert: Yeah. Jim Tincher, HoC: farther, but I just wanted to bring up that so our listeners could hear a little bit more about that debate back and forth. the key answer is not. What works for Laurie's company, it's not what works for my research. It's inside your company. In your data, what your executives want to know is what in your data predicts whether your customers grow. So take the time to find out what the right link is for that. one of our customers found that confident clients spend 25% more than others. For them, it's confidence. It varies by brand. So do the work to find out yourself. All right, my last question, Laurie, is you know. When we first met fifteen years ago, I don't think you could spell data. Now you're talking about it regularly, it's become part of it. So you've learned a lot over the last fifteen years. Laurie Englert: That's so funny. Jim Tincher, HoC: Where do you go to learn? Laurie Englert: Where do I go to learn? my gosh. Jim Tincher, HoC: Yeah. Laurie Englert: So I sat on I could tell you seven podcasts about SEO, where it's going, AEO, answer engine optimization guys, because now guess what? We're gonna have to target Chat GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude. Because now we need them to make sure our questions are in their thing and that when When somebody asks something, LeBron comes up because the conversation is gonna keep going. It's not just one click anymore. It truly is a different way to reach customers. So I listen to podcasts. I read I I more listen. I'm a big audible person. I listen to so many books. When I was doing this digital transformation, I'm a I'm very much a creative. To your point, not as analytical. I don't like dive deep into the numbers, but I dive into the experience, right? And now data, Jim'd be so proud. I have the product data quality team, they they report to me and they've taught me a ton. So I learn a lot from my people. Like I truly believe I've got a skill set that is probably more innovative thinking, and I'm out here, but the People on my team ground me in data, in finance, in all those things maybe I'm not good at because together we make all this happen, right? I mean, it's truly, it's it's my team, it's really great books, it's great podcasts. It's also this, I don't like to go into any meeting not knowing something that's so important that could impact our future. So Every time I feel like somebody's trying to say, you know, work on this or work on that, it's like I need to understand it so that we can be smart about it and make good decisions. Jim Tincher, HoC: All right. So now hopefully you all will listen to this podcast in the future. I hope you're learning as well. Laurie Englert: Yeah, yeah. Jim Tincher, HoC: Few things before we let you go. First of all, Laurie, if somebody has a question for you, wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to contact you? Is it LinkedIn, email, your home address? What's the best way? Laurie Englert: Sure, find me on LinkedIn. Happy to answer any questions. Jim Tincher, HoC: And listeners, before I let you go, here's your assignment. And it's coming from Laurie's, not mine. Pick one account that you think is healthy, not a problem account, a good one. And then talk to the person who actually uses your product. Not the purchase order person, they matter, but the one who actually touches it. You know, if it's if you're a component manufacturer, maybe the person in manufacturing. If you're a chemical manufacturer, perhaps it's the you know, might be the physicists or the chemists, I should say chemists. If you've got software, maybe the users, but talk to them who actually touches it. And ask Laurie's three questions she gave me when our pre-call. What's the best product you've ever used? What do we sell that you know nothing about? And what's the one product that scares you to death? The second one's where the money is because they don't know about it today. So write down what they know you sold so you can start looking at how we can expand from that. And all it costs is one phone call. And it gives you a ton of information. And so there's your assignment. Talk to one client, learn what's there. All right, that wraps up our episode here. Again, my name is Jim Tincher, and I want your feedback. Please send me an email, Jim at heart of the customer.com. Who should we have as the next guest? What B2B issues should we talk about? I'd love to hear from you. Again, this is Jim Tincher wrapping up From Stalled to Scaling.