Latest / From Stalled to Scaling / I Made This Sound Easier Than it Is
Transcript
- Jim Tincher, HoC: Now, who makes the decisions that decide whether your existing accounts grow or shrink? Typically, it's somebody who doesn't report to you. When I wrote Do B2B Better, I gave that problem one chapter. But as we've analyzed seven different industries, 800 interviews, recognize something. It's closer to the whole job. Here's where growth stalls, and the one meeting that starts at moving. I'm Jim Tincher and this is from stall to scaling. Eight minute ideas for B2B leaders on growing the accounts you already have. So here's the deal: you own the growth number. You may be a CMO, it might be a chief commercial officer, something like that, but you're responsible for growth. But other teams moan moan most of the levers that actually drive that growth. And they don't report to you. They aren't measured on your number. And but yet what customers say about their work is a leading indicator of your growth. So that's really the challenge here. And we look across different industries because we see the same outcome. We're brought in by a CMO. And we analyze what's getting in the way of their customers growing with them. We see over and over again, it's happening somewhere else in the organization. And the key to success is how do you engage the rest of the organization in growth? And that's what determines whether you're a super successful growth leader or whether you're just moving with, you know, putting out campaigns and trying to grow the numbers on your own. Now that's just not what I found. McKinsey found that 70% of digital transformations. Fail mostly because of employee resistance. Now, if we look at digital transformation, I know today is all about AI, but five years ago it was all about digital transformation. And you had the board support, it was highly visible, probably more visible than your customer growth program. And yet more than two-thirds of the time it failed. So if that fails, well, what's going to happen when you would need to grow your existing accounts? So you're working with your fellow executives, don't focus on getting agreement. Agreement's cheap, and really nobody changes their decisions by agreeing with what's in your report. The magic isn't in that one meeting in the report. The magic is when you move down into the organization. So writing a report is cheap and easy. It might take you an afternoon. Changing decision probably takes you a month of effort, but that one has way bigger payoff. So let's first see, for example, if I were in manufacturing and I could only measure one number, that's it. It would be availability of product. And making sure the right customers get the right product at the right time. Now that requires a supply and chain manager. She's got to make a different call. She makes this call 40 times a week, but she needs to make it differently. Changing her priorities away from whatever she had to focusing on the high growth accounts. And so if she's just looking at a slide, she might agree there and go right back to what she did in the past. But she changes it when she can understand how this impacts the most important customers, how it translates to growth, and more importantly, how it's a win for her. she cares about customers. I'm sure she does. She cares about the company. But what she cares about more is her boss saying she's doing a good job and maybe getting reported, getting promoted. And that's the challenge and the hard work when we look at customer experience, we look at growth, is that while you may be responsible for that growth number, the levers fall throughout the entire organization, typically in groups that don't know about customers. What I've seen typically is between 90 and 95% of employees in a manufacturing or other B2B company, it varies in some, but generally 90 to 95% of employees have never met a customer. And so when you're asking them to make different decisions, they don't have that history to pull back on about talking to a customer. They've never done it. And so the hard work is how do you translate the outcomes you need that you're responsible for? Into a win for them. And that's what moves revenue is when the organization makes different decisions. And that takes the hard work. And that's part of the reason why, if you're picking your lieutenant, what I found is picking somebody with a great resume from the outside, yeah, that doesn't work. Because in order to make this change, you need to know who the supply chain manager is. You have to have a good relationship with her. And you have to know her boss and have that support too. Nobody from the outside has that kind of credibility. You need to build your team from inside the organization. And so coming back to what's critical here is You can do all the items I talked about in the book. You can first of all identify that what we're trying to change is net revenue retention or the number of products per customer. You've you've aligned on the most important outcomes. You've identified what it is that causes a customer to change that. So you've learned if they're confident, for example, they'll change. And you've looked at the operational data and you've seen what matters from that. Again, like maybe on-time delivery or availability of product. But all that. That's wasted if you can't get the people to make different decisions. So your growth in existing accounts, it depends on departments you don't manage. If I give you one suggestion, it would be to ask your operation team to mark every scorecard line a customer would notice and bring it back to you. So take their whole scorecard, mark it down, and say, okay, these items, what would customers notice if it changed? And then you're going to find out what's missing because a lot of what your customers will notice probably isn't in anybody's scorecard. Now you can learn more about this at heartofthecustomer.com, our site. You can sign up for the newsletter. You can sign up for the blog. You can learn more about white papers. You can also learn more about this at Heart of the Customer, or sorry, in the book Do B2B Better. So let's wrap up here. Now I'd like your feedback on this episode and others. So what landed here? What didn't what should I take on next?