Latest / From Stalled to Scaling / The Number You Already Own
Transcript
- Jim Tincher, HoC: Your customer survey has a score on it. Your PL has a number on it. If nobody in your company can explain how the first one impacts the second one, your survey is a hobby and an expensive one. What's strange is that fixing it costs nothing because both numbers already exist. I'm Jim Tincher, and this is From Stalled to Scaling, eight-minute ideas for B2B leaders on growing through the customers they already have. Everything in this episode comes from the research behind my book, Do B2B Better. That book lays out four actions that separate the companies growing through the customers they already have from the ones that stall. This is the one called Point the Flywheel. Three out of four companies measuring their customers cannot show their work produces any business results at all. Only one in four can. That comes from customer think. From Exxum Institute and my own research. That one in four that I call change makers is not better at surveys. They start somewhere else entirely. They start with a number the business already owns and the ones executives care about. Growth in existing accounts, retention, maybe cost to serve. Then they work backward and ask what has to change in operations to move it. The most, I call them hopefuls because they're working hard and they hope it matters. The three-quarters start with a score and hope it leads somewhere. Here's the truth underneath that. The programs get eliminated are swimming in sentiment. The ones that are growing are swimming in operations. Now here I mean operations broadly, not literally your operations team, although them too, but your policies, your relationships. How easy you are to order from. Your policies, it's not just the plant. Here's an example from Roxy Strowminger from my book. She ran Customer Experience Strategy at UKG. They sell payroll and workforce software, and she did the same, did the thing that almost nobody does, and that she didn't start with a score. She started with three questions her business already asked every quarter. Will this customer stay? Will they buy more from us? And what do they cost to serve? Then she worked back for those three to figure out which emotions move them. The answer was confidence. Confidence is now the outcome UKG designs for because it predicts those outcomes they care about. That's the whole move because she left the financial question choose the metric. Instead of choosing a metric like NPS or satisfaction, then hunting for a financial question to attach it to. So notice what she didn't do. She didn't go looking for a benchmark, ask what other people do. She didn't ask what score a good company has. And she didn't start by buying a platform. She took three questions her own leadership team was already arguing about in their own meetings, and made those three what her measurement had to explain. Run that same move in your own company, and it usually starts with one of two numbers: growth inside existing accounts or cost to serve. Now, what I've found is most executives are focused on growth. So let's say you pick growth in the base. That's what you want to understand. Then the question stops being how satisfied are your customers. It starts becomes becoming which accounts grew last year and what was different about how we serve. That's a question your order data can answer, and it's a question your sales leadership will sit still for. The survey becomes one input into it instead of the whole conversation. Now you already have last year's answer sitting in your order data. Nobody has to collect anything new to start this, which is why I keep saying it costs nothing. When you start with the financial question, your findings arrive already attached to something the leadership team owns. You're not asking anybody for attention, you're reporting on their number and what matters. And this is the good news about this whole approach. The growth your leadership is looking for is already sitting in the accounts you serve. You don't need a new market to go get it. You need to be able to see it and how in the past you've earned that growth. So this comes back to tinture truth number twenty-six. Programs, whether marketing or customer experience that get eliminated are swimming in sentiment. That's where they start, that's where they end. The ones that grow are swimming in operations, in financial data. The survey is not the score. A customer who buys more from you is the score. Your survey is used to help understand what is leading customers to buy more. It's the leading indicator. When done right. And then they also make a connection to operations, understand where in your operations you need to impact. So here's your assignment, and it takes 10 minutes. Write down two numbers. First, the one financial number you're personally accountable for. Not your company, yours. If you don't have one, then go with the company folks about. And the second is the headline number your customer measurements report to you. Put them next to each other on one line. If you can't draw a straight line between them, you just found the most valuable unfunded project in your business, and it costs nothing to start. These two numbers are connected by something. It isn't satisfaction. And finding out what it is takes the rest of this show. This podcast. We'll go over this over many episodes. You can find the full research at heart of the customer.com, including the article this episode came from. You can also find, that's in our blogs. You can also read more about this in Do Be2Be Better. Drive growth through a game-changing customer experience, where I walk through the research, and this is the whole first quarter of the book: is how to connect to financials. I also have another request for you. Give me your feedback. Tell me from the podcast what's landed, what didn't. What should I take on next and what are your two numbers? Email me at gym at heart of the customer dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.