Latest / Sales Pipeline Radio / Tiffani Bova Will Change The Way You Think About Growth

Transcript

Tiffani Bova Will Change The Way You Think About Growth · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt: All right.
• 0:16
  Well, welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:20
  Thank you very much for joining us.
• 0:21
  I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
• 0:22
  Excited to have you here if you're watching, listening live on this Thursday
• 0:26
  afternoon, the East Coast, late morning on the West Coast thank you so much
• 0:29
  for making us part of your work day.
• 0:31
  You have an opportunity to be part of the show today.
• 0:33
  If you have a question, a comment, a rebuttal for myself or our guest
• 0:37
  today, Tiffani Bova add that into LinkedIn or into YouTube or
• 0:40
  to Facebook and we'll Feature in the show, bring you up on screen.
• 0:44
  Have some fun with, make this as interactive as we can.
• 0:46
  If you are listening, watching on Demand, appreciate all of your downloads and
• 0:49
  subscriptions and appreciate just you paying attention to what we're doing here.
• 0:53
  We are on episode, I think 385 of Sales Pipeline Radio going back several years.
• 0:58
  Tiffani is a repeat visitor, a guest of the program.
• 1:01
  So excited to have her back.
• 1:01
  And if you wanna listen to or watch any of those past episodes all available
• 1:05
  at www.Salespipelineradio.com.
• 1:07
  As I mentioned, we got Tiffani Bova here today, guys.
• 1:11
  Multi-time author, speaker.
• 1:13
  I think I say that.
• 1:14
  You've spoken in 50 plus countries in Los Angeles today.
• 1:18
  But thank you very much for taking a few minutes to, to join us today.
• 1:22
  Tiffani: Oh, there's no place I'd rather be, love talking to the sales
• 1:26
  audience, so I'm looking forward to it.
• 1:28
  Matt: Well, what I love about our audience is we get sales, we get marketing, and
• 1:31
  the marketers that join us are those that understand that a big part of their job is
• 1:35
  to drive revenue impact on the business.
• 1:37
  It doesn't mean that you're subservient to sales, but it means
• 1:40
  you can't buy lunch with your MQLs.
• 1:43
  You gotta find some add metric that you can buy a beer with.
• 1:47
  And I was real excited when I got a copy of your new book, The Experience Mindset.
• 1:49
  So I wanted to be able to talk about that.
• 1:51
  And what that means.
• 1:52
  So for the maybe four people listening who don't know who you
• 1:55
  are, can you just kinda quick give a little introduction to yourself?
• 1:58
  Tiffani: Sure.
• 1:58
  I'm the global growth evangelist at Salesforce.
• 2:02
  I'm sure you've heard of us.
• 2:04
  Prior to joining Salesforce, it's been seven years now, I was a research fellow
• 2:07
  at Gartner covering sales transformation, impact of digital technology to the way
• 2:12
  brands engage with customers and a myriad of other things, but mostly sales and
• 2:17
  marketing and customer service related.
• 2:19
  Prior to that, I was actually a practitioning leader, so I was
• 2:22
  an individual quota carrying sales rep, selling technology.
• 2:25
  Then I took over sales leadership, then marketing, then customer success in
• 2:29
  startups as well as Fortune 500 companies.
• 2:32
  So practitioner academic, and now doing a little bit of both here
• 2:36
  at Salesforce and two-time author.
• 2:37
  Matt: Yeah, two time author.
• 2:38
  So the other book that we had you on before Growth IQ highly
• 2:42
  recommend people check that out.
• 2:43
  Such a great book.
• 2:44
  And you know, kudos to Salesforce and I know a lot of companies doing this
• 2:47
  now that are going out and saying like, we're gonna find creators, we're
• 2:49
  gonna find academics, we're gonna find people that question the world
• 2:52
  on a daily basis and are gonna talk to our customers, talk to the market.
• 2:56
  Continue to just like provide insights on a lot of that.
• 2:59
  And so I know through your thought leadership here What's Next
• 3:01
  podcast, which I recommend as well.
• 3:03
  Lots of ways to sort of get what you are consuming and then filtering into things
• 3:08
  that are super valuable for people.
• 3:10
  I know the variety of stuff you're thinking about and writing
• 3:12
  about and speaking about on your podcast, why Experience Mindset?
• 3:16
  Why did that topic kind of emerge as your sort of pick for the next book?
• 3:22
  Tiffani: I had no plan on writing a second book.
• 3:24
  The first book was hard enough for me.
• 3:26
  Like, look, I'm a classic seller, right, like I get revved up by deals
• 3:31
  and challenges and solving customer problems and all of those things.
• 3:34
  I no longer sell and carry a quota.
• 3:36
  So I get to vicariously sell and market and do, you know, customer service,
• 3:40
  customer success through all of you.
• 3:42
  But Growth IQ was a way for me to take my 10 to 12 years of being a practitioning
• 3:48
  individual contributor, and leader; 10 years of advising the largest 50
• 3:53
  technology companies in the world on how to be better on their go-to-market
• 3:56
  strategies and put it into a book.
• 3:59
  A way for me to say, if I were to give my top 10 tips, right, what would it be?
• 4:04
  And that really was Growth IQ.
• 4:05
  My very first growth path there was customer experience.
• 4:10
  And the book, let's just say I'm rounding numbers is 60,000 words.
• 4:13
  I probably spent a hundred talking about employee.
• 4:17
  So it was a big miss for me actually.
• 4:19
  In Growth IQ so fast forward I joined Salesforce and really I have a front
• 4:23
  row seat into the power of people and culture on the ability for company
• 4:28
  that, you know, this particular one, right, to innovate faster, be highly
• 4:32
  resilient, very responsive, and then grow.
• 4:35
  And because of the space we play in, it's a great way for me to then see a
• 4:40
  front row seat or what are the challenges that sellers and marketers and customer
• 4:44
  success leaders are actually facing.
• 4:46
  And it led me to a statement I made that I didn't think it was a coincidence that
• 4:50
  Salesforce is a great place to work.
• 4:51
  One of the most innovative companies in the world and
• 4:53
  the fastest growing enterprise software company, could I prove it?
• 4:56
  Could I prove that the people side of that allowed us to innovate and
• 5:00
  grow faster than than others?
• 5:03
  So I went to our prior CMO, and she said, sure , let's do it.
• 5:05
  And so we did it, and then it ended up being three research projects
• 5:08
  over the course of two years, and it was such rich, comprehensive set
• 5:14
  of insights that I was like, uhoh, I think I have to write a second book.
• 5:19
  And so here you go.
• 5:20
  The Experienced Mindset was born.
• 5:22
  Matt: So Experienced MIndset's, the new book, it's only a couple weeks out.
• 5:26
  Definitely get your copy of that.
• 5:27
  It's a topic that I think on the surface is like sort of this, no duh, right?
• 5:31
  It's like you wanna create a good experience for your employees.
• 5:34
  The majority of employees say that they'd work harder if
• 5:36
  they were better appreciated.
• 5:37
  The majority of employees say they just wanna be treated better and
• 5:41
  the majority of HR managers say, legit, we're trying to do that.
• 5:44
  So like, there's something that's not connecting here.
• 5:47
  I assume that there are some companies that really aren't focused on that.
• 5:50
  They may not mean not companies you wanna work for, but for
• 5:51
  the well-meaning companies that want to create that experience.
• 5:55
  What's missing?
• 5:55
  Where's the gap?
• 5:56
  Tiffani: You know, listen, I was very early in this thing
• 6:01
  called the Worldwide Web.
• 6:02
  I sold my very first domain name in 1996.
• 6:05
  I purchased my first one in 1997.
• 6:08
  I was running a sales, marketing and customer service division of a
• 6:12
  web hosting and domain company that was doing commerce online 2000 to
• 6:18
  2004 . So I, was a Loquis beta client..
• 6:21
  I was Constant Contact's beta client.
• 6:23
  So I have watched the explosion of the marketing technology stack as someone
• 6:28
  who used it and then advised around it.
• 6:30
  And now obviously I work here and so I can tell you that we do
• 6:34
  not have a technology problem.
• 6:36
  There was no shortage back then.
• 6:37
  In 2000, there was a half a dozen marketing technologies out there.
• 6:42
  Really I was using, in some cases a single user version of ACT or Goldmine.
• 6:46
  Some of you may not even know what that is, and this software as a
• 6:49
  service option, Salesforce was a couple years old at that time.
• 6:53
  So now there are some 10,000 marketing technologies that are tracked by
• 6:58
  the analyst community, which would then lead me to believe, well, gosh,
• 7:02
  if there's that many, we should be doing such a better job on selling.
• 7:06
  But yet 54% of sellers are gonna miss quota, only 28% of
• 7:11
  their time is spent selling.
• 7:13
  And, we have no shortage of how many tools that a seller
• 7:17
  needs to go to to do their job.
• 7:18
  And so, specifically in this comment, the experience of the seller, hasn't
• 7:24
  gotten any better because of all the advancements of technology.
• 7:27
  Or has it gotten more complicated?
• 7:28
  And so the Experience Mindset was really this way to say we've over pivoted
• 7:33
  to taking care of all the needs and increasing expectations of customers
• 7:39
  at the expense of our employees.
• 7:40
  And I'll give one example to that.
• 7:42
  We would never, ever ask our customers to have five tabs open and have
• 7:48
  to hop between nine applications to place an order with us.
• 7:51
  Yet we do that for our employees.
• 7:54
  Our salespeople, our customer success leaders.
• 7:56
  So the Experience Mindset is about really trying to balance more intentionally the
• 8:01
  efforts you put towards your customers, as you do towards your employees.
• 8:05
  Matt: So literally, right before we recorded this, I was on a call with
• 8:08
  a prospect and, we were talking about sales teams, making phone calls and
• 8:11
  we can have a whole nother topic about why focusing on more phone
• 8:14
  calls is probably not a great idea.
• 8:16
  But he's like, I just can't figure out how to get more activity out of my sales team.
• 8:19
  And I said, well, you know, what tasks you're asking 'em to
• 8:22
  do, you know what steps you're asking them to do between calls?
• 8:25
  He said, he kind of pulling it out, he said, do you know
• 8:26
  how much time that takes?
• 8:28
  If you're a sales leader or even a marketing leader, if you're responsible
• 8:30
  for sales enablement somewhere and you haven't literally sat and watched your
• 8:34
  sales reps work, I mean, you could do it remotely-- have them share their screen
• 8:38
  and have them just like finish a call or an email or something, and then all the
• 8:42
  different things you ask them to do across multiple platforms ... it's so easy for
• 8:46
  us when we're not selling to not see that.
• 8:49
  And yet your reps are struggling if not suffering based on that experience.
• 8:54
  And, so, some of this is just awareness, right?
• 8:56
  Like when you, when you finally get someone to sit down and
• 8:58
  watch how someone actually has to sell and like manage their day.
• 9:01
  Yeah.
• 9:01
  It's like, holy crap, this is terrible.
• 9:02
  I would never do this.
• 9:02
  We have to fix this.
• 9:04
  Is it that easy?
• 9:04
  I mean, is the first step just being aware of the problem?
• 9:08
  Tiffani: Yeah.
• 9:08
  This research was not just around sales . This was all up from employee, right.
• 9:12
  We're I'm just angling it towards sales and marketing.
• 9:14
  But a few things we, asked the employees and we asked the C-suite,
• 9:20
  this was a global study, multiple size and industry organizations what are
• 9:24
  the challenges for company success?
• 9:28
  Tied for number one from employees was: teammates and colleagues leave too often.
• 9:35
  So it's disruptive, right?
• 9:36
  Like, hey, we were on a project that was my go-to person, and boom, they're gone.
• 9:41
  And so it's not just the expensive backfilling, it's also the state
• 9:45
  it leaves those left behind in.
• 9:47
  Right.
• 9:47
  So that was one of the tide for one.
• 9:50
  The second tied for one was outdated technology.
• 9:54
  On the C-suite side, that outdated tech was number six.
• 9:57
  It was the largest gap between what the C-suite and the employees thought.
• 10:02
  The double click underneath that was 52% of the C-suite believed
• 10:07
  that the technology that was deployed and their employees were
• 10:10
  using was working effectively.
• 10:12
  Which means if you're quick at math, 48% believe it isn't for another day.
• 10:18
  So, 32% of the blended employee base agrees that the technology
• 10:24
  they're using is working effectively.
• 10:25
  So now we've got a 20% gap between C-suite and general employees.
• 10:31
  The killer on it was only 20% of customer facing employees agree that the technology
• 10:39
  they're using allows them to collaborate, be more effective and more productive.
• 10:43
  So that stat alone when companies are trying to grow-- if your customer
• 10:49
  facing employees are struggling with the technology, but it's not
• 10:52
  just that it was outdated processes, it was silos between teams.
• 10:57
  It was lack of data, it was lack of access to data, right?
• 11:01
  It was training and enablement.
• 11:03
  People are starving for you to help them be more successful in what they do.
• 11:08
  And those that are touching customers on a daily basis and have an interaction
• 11:12
  with a customer is really the audience that the book was targeting.
• 11:16
  I'm not targeting all things about HR.
• 11:18
  Look, I am not a people expert or a culture expert.
• 11:21
  It's not my lane.
• 11:22
  So I'm looking at the moment that matters when an employee touches a
• 11:26
  customer and do they have what they need in order to deliver that amazing,
• 11:31
  compelling experience the executives have promised out to the street when
• 11:35
  those employees are actually the keepers of those promises, right?
• 11:39
  They're the ones that deliver upon that promise, like, we're gonna be the easiest
• 11:42
  to do business with, okay, but you've just made me jump through nine hoops to
• 11:47
  deliver that experience to the customer.
• 11:49
  They had one click, I had nine.
• 11:52
  Matt: I'm talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Tiffani Bova.
• 11:55
  She is the author of the new book, The Experience Mindset.
• 11:58
  As Preston commented just now on LinkedIn, like, how are organizations
• 12:02
  not adopting this already?
• 12:04
  How indeed.
• 12:04
  Right, because I think some people may not be aware that there's that big of a gap.
• 12:07
  The data you just shared, it's pretty startling.
• 12:09
  It tells me you've got executives who are deciding where to deploy resources and
• 12:12
  budget-- don't think this is a problem.
• 12:14
  If they think this is a problem, then there's gotta be resources and budget
• 12:17
  put in to try to solve for this.
• 12:19
  All of a sudden, that costs money . Okay, where's that money gonna come from?
• 12:22
  But if you don't invest in this, I think start to think about very quickly and
• 12:25
  easily the cascading impact that has on morale, on retention, on the way
• 12:31
  your employees are treating customers.
• 12:33
  It reminds me a little bit of some data I saw it was a couple years ago from
• 12:37
  CEB which no longer exists) talking about how complex it is for customers
• 12:41
  to buy and how sellers talked about just how hard it was for them to sell,
• 12:45
  navigating their own internal experience, not just with tech, but their internal
• 12:49
  legal, their internal procurement.
• 12:52
  And so this problem just keeps getting harder as buying cycles get longer.
• 12:56
  As customer relationships get more complex, as you have this buying
• 12:59
  committee as well as a user committee that you're trying to engage as well.
• 13:04
  I'm curious, given that the book just came out, I'm assuming like
• 13:06
  a lot of your research was during or post pandemic and like how does
• 13:10
  remote and hybrid work impact or further complicate delivering a better
• 13:15
  experience, especially for employees?
• 13:17
  Tiffani: Oh, I'm gonna answer Preston's question.
• 13:19
  And why are they not doing it?
• 13:21
  When we first got started to get the research back, I was sharing it
• 13:24
  remotely, as you mentioned, just because of the timing of it and I probably
• 13:27
  did a hundred round tables around the globe with executives that were in
• 13:31
  human resources, revenue or sales, marketing, IT, customer experience so
• 13:37
  you might have chief customer officers.
• 13:38
  The only one really missing in any real number was probably the CFO.
• 13:43
  And, I heard the same thing: if it's so obvious, why isn't everyone doing it?
• 13:46
  This is no new concept.
• 13:48
  Happy employee, happy customer.
• 13:50
  Get those two right you get greater growth rates.
• 13:52
  But when we went out and looked across the market, we had not found anybody who
• 13:56
  had proven the connection between the two.
• 13:59
  We see a lot of research around if you get CX right, you're
• 14:01
  gonna get this kind of lift.
• 14:02
  If you get employee stuff right, you're gonna see this kind of lift.
• 14:05
  But, and, and that sort of loose directional comment like, well,
• 14:09
  if your employees are happy, your customers are gonna be happier.
• 14:11
  And we see these things, but we didn't see the direct correlation,
• 14:13
  nor did we see causation.
• 14:15
  So part of it is we found no one owns employee experience.
• 14:19
  Now this is not about creating a new role.
• 14:21
  I was part of the team in 2008 that advocated for the fact that the chief
• 14:26
  marketing officer get a seat at the C-suite table and really drive and lead
• 14:31
  customer experience when I was at Gartner.
• 14:33
  And so I'm not advocating for that in this case.
• 14:35
  That's why it is actually called The Experience Mindset.
• 14:38
  It's an intentional operating philosophy to say if we do something
• 14:42
  for one we understand the intended or unintended consequences to the other.
• 14:46
  So I think part of it is they're not adopting it because there's no
• 14:50
  maturity similar to what we have in CX.
• 14:54
  Net promoter scores, we can tell that when we get see a lift in
• 14:57
  NPS, we see a correlating revenue.
• 15:00
  But on the employee side, it tends to be are they satisfied, are they attriting?
• 15:04
  Like, what does our pipeline look like of our employees?
• 15:07
  But we're not doing the same things to them.
• 15:09
  So the other is not only does not someone not own it, but two, we're surveying
• 15:15
  our employees pretty consistently, you know, once, twice a year.
• 15:18
  During the pandemic, it was much more, maybe you do it quarterly.
• 15:21
  The majority is not doing anything with the data they collect.
• 15:25
  So part of the reason they're not doing it is because they don't know
• 15:28
  where they have these opportunities.
• 15:30
  They're not looking for these gaps between what the C-Suite
• 15:33
  thinks is happening and employees.
• 15:35
  It is a lot about internal inertia.
• 15:37
  Status quo ism.
• 15:39
  Oh, oh, we're growing, so don't disrupt the apple cart.
• 15:42
  What we're doing is working.
• 15:43
  You know, that kind of mindset holds you back from really starting to uncover
• 15:50
  why are you having these issues in your organization, and how and where could
• 15:53
  you make it better, especially for those that are working and engaging with
• 15:57
  your customers on a daily, daily basis.
• 15:59
  Matt: Well, and there's a famous interaction in Mad Men, right?
• 16:03
  Where between Don Draper and the copywriter where she's like, she says
• 16:06
  she wants to be appreciated and he says that's what the money is for, right?
• 16:10
  And so like I give you a paycheck, I pay you twice a month.
• 16:13
  Like, then I expect you to do the hard work.
• 16:15
  And I think that anyone wants to feel respected, anyone wants to be
• 16:18
  seen thought of as like, okay, this, this company respects and honors me
• 16:22
  and recognizes the work I'm doing.
• 16:24
  Recognition is free, right?, it's a limitless resource and
• 16:28
  sometimes that's all it takes.
• 16:29
  One of the quotes from your book that I loved is that the Allstate CEO talks
• 16:32
  about treating employees as customers.
• 16:34
  Not as something you take for granted, not as something that's transactional, and
• 16:37
  they pay you million in dollars, but in hard work, like people are willing work...
• 16:40
  Tiffani: so, so basic, right?
• 16:41
  Just so basic.
• 16:42
  Matt: Yeah.
• 16:43
  . But your point about no one really owning that.
• 16:45
  I think some people may default to say, well, HR owns that, right?
• 16:47
  It's like, no, not really.
• 16:48
  I mean, it's a whole different set of things that HR traditionally has
• 16:50
  been focused on and yet, if you think about customer experience, Is a thing,
• 16:55
  employee experience, very similar thing.
• 16:58
  And you think about the opportunity cost of not doing that gets pretty scary.
• 17:02
  Tiffani: Yeah.
• 17:02
  And, look, you mentioned it-- recognition.
• 17:04
  We found five key elements within the employee experience that has
• 17:10
  the greatest impact on customer.
• 17:12
  It was trust.
• 17:13
  C-suite, accountability, alignment, recognition, which you've just
• 17:18
  said, Matt and seamless technology.
• 17:20
  Do you trust me?
• 17:21
  Do I trust you?
• 17:21
  You know, when we all got sent home and some people had installed onto
• 17:26
  their desktops or laptops, keystroke tracking software, and you had to leave
• 17:30
  your camera on during office hours.
• 17:31
  That is not building trust.
• 17:33
  C-suite accountability is your C-suite doing what they
• 17:36
  say and saying what they do.
• 17:37
  You know, is there a seat at the table around discussions around some
• 17:40
  of the things we're talking about?
• 17:42
  Alignment, meaning like the values of the company aligned to the people who work
• 17:46
  there and vice versa, that you don't have people doing things that are unlike it.
• 17:50
  And then recognition, like it's not just about compensation, right?
• 17:54
  It's about.
• 17:55
  Do I get a promotion?
• 17:56
  Did I get, pat on the back?
• 17:57
  Did I get employee of the month?
• 17:59
  That goes a long way.
• 18:00
  For morale and all kinds of things.
• 18:02
  And then the last seamless tech, which we talked about has huge
• 18:06
  impact on the amount of effort an employee has to put forth to do their
• 18:10
  job and also their satisfaction.
• 18:13
  Matt: So trust, C-Suite, accountability, alignment, which I also put as values
• 18:18
  recognition and seamless technology.
• 18:21
  It'd be really interesting, if you're listening to this, how would you
• 18:23
  rate where you are honestly on this?
• 18:26
  How would your executive team rank where they are honestly on this?
• 18:29
  How would employees rank you?
• 18:31
  On these could give you sort of a stack rank opportunity of saying maybe we
• 18:35
  can't boil the ocean, but like, where can you start making improvements?
• 18:37
  Where can you start making this a bigger priority for your organization, part
• 18:40
  of your real culture moving forward?
• 18:42
  And there's no better way to get started on that than reading The Experience
• 18:45
  Mindset and your book by Tiffani Bova.
• 18:46
  I know we're outta time and you're super busy.
• 18:48
  Thank you so much Tiffani for being here and joining us,
• 18:51
  giving us a little bit of time.
• 18:53
  www.tiffanibova.com is usually where I go to get your content, to get
• 18:55
  your podcast, the books available wherever smart books are sold.
• 18:59
  Where else could people learn a little more about you?
• 19:01
  Tiffani: I'm pretty active on social.
• 19:03
  I have no more connections left on LinkedIn, but you can follow me.
• 19:06
  I'm also active on Twitter @tiffani_bova Instagram, Facebook, a YouTube channel.
• 19:11
  And then my podcast, What's Next?
• 19:12
  With Tiffani Bova.
• 19:13
  So thanks for having me, Matt.
• 19:15
  Matt: If anyone from LinkedIn is listening to this, the 30,000 connection,
• 19:19
  I know it seems like a lot to some people, but like Tiffani's gotta
• 19:22
  have a higher limit than that, right?
• 19:23
  It just doesn't seem fair.
• 19:24
  So anyway, thank you again.
• 19:26
  Tiffani: Well, I was early for me and so the problem is it was like, it's
• 19:28
  2006 or something-- you initially you're like, I wanna connect with everybody.
• 19:32
  Then you make a decision at some point, I'm only gonna connect with
• 19:34
  people who I'm at who maybe I actually know or there's a reason to connect.
• 19:37
  And then there was not very many left when I got to that, maybe 10 years ago.
• 19:41
  Yeah.
• 19:41
  Matt: This is correct.
• 19:42
  Yeah.
• 19:42
  It's a problem.
• 19:43
  Anyway, thank you so much again for doing this.
• 19:45
  Thank you everyone.
• 19:46
  I'm on vacation next two weeks.
• 19:47
  We're gonna take a little hiatus from Sales Pipeline here.
• 19:49
  We'll be back in July.
• 19:50
  New guest, new topics.
• 19:52
  Thanks again for watching and listening.
• 19:53
  We'll see you next time.
• 19:54
  Take care.