Latest / From Stalled to Scaling / It Was Never a Persuasion Problem
Transcript
- Jim Tincher, HoC: Why do your leaders nod at the customer update and then move straight to the revenue slides? I wrote a book about winning over skeptical executives. Then I interviewed 34 of those C-suite leaders and found out I had it backwards. None of them needed convincing that customers matter. What they lacked was a line from that customer data to growth. Now, today's session you're going to come away with a reasonable update stall and a test for fixing them. That's harder than it looks. I'm Jim Tincher, and this is From Stalled to Scaling: Eight-minute ideas for B2B leaders on growing through the accounts you already have. And before we get started, head on over to heartofthecustomer.com, where you can find the blog post this is based on. You can sign up for our newsletters or the blog posts, download white papers. It's all there. The argument that made four years ago was that your leadership team does not believe that customer experience work pays. And those in charge of customer experience, for example, the CMO, your job is to win them over. And that felt right at the time because I was talking to CX leaders and they all described the same wall. But then last year, I put the question indirectly to 34 C-suite leaders. And here's what I learned. Everyone Yes, including the CFOs and COOs, everyone was deeply customer focused. Many of them could name individual accounts, what's going wrong inside of them. They're very familiar with the customers and they value your customers. And what I'd missed though is the priority above that. And all of the 34 had the same goal, and that's growth. And they're indifferent to anything that isn't tied to growth. Gartner asked about the top priorities for his CEOs, and sixty-two percent of them named growth as their top priority, the highest in a decade. And so growth matters. That's what helps your C suite to keep their jobs, let alone get promoted. Now, when I did those 34 interviews, a number stayed with me. Of the 34, how many could connect customer experience work to growth and put a figure to it? The answer was one. Only one. The other 33 were planning growth without looking at the leading indicators in their own customer data because nobody had ever connected what your customers are telling you. To what your customers will do. So it turns out it was never a persuasion problem. It's a translation problem. And we talk about persuasion, that means building a case for why customers matter. And all 34 already believe it. It's about translation, which means taking what you know and translating to their units they're accountable for. Taking the customer data and turning it into revenue, retention, share of wallets. And what we know is very few organizations actually do that. A customer update that leads with an NPS score, it's asking for attention. Hey, here's our score. Please care. An update that leads with which accounts grew and what in the survey tells us what was different about them and how you serve them. Now that's reporting on the number your executives care about. So if you're a CMO and your team is bringing forth the customer numbers. And you're just noticing them nodding and then moving on? Keep the same data, but change the analysis so that your outcome is not a net promoter score, your outcome is a growing account. That version gets a follow-up question. The NPS version gets a nod. So here's a test I use for understanding whether you've been translating to them. Can your senior executives repeat? What they heard on their to their own boss or to the CEO without you there. If you improve NPS and they can't report, repeat it, and talk about it, it fails at test because the next question is always about what it's worth. A sentence like: accounts in the top quarter tile on this measure grew four points faster than the rest. Now that's something the executive will care about repeat. That number travels on its own. None of this requires new research, it requires a different attitude and a different focus. Take the work your team's already doing, but report it against a different outcome. Reported against behavioral data, specifically ordering data. So I watched a leader do this with a quarterly review she'd given for two years. She kept the overall data the same, but changed her slides so that the first line from this score moved three points. That's what she used to have. So NPS went up three points. To here are six accounts that grew. And here's what we did differently in them. And here's how the survey helps us look at this at scale. The meeting ran 40 minutes over. The work hadn't changed, but for the first time, it was about the number the other executives were already arguing about. It helped them understand what they needed to do differently. And that gave me a line I should have written about four years ago in the book. How can I get my CEO to care about CX? Is the wrong question. Now, your CEO already cares about customers. They just don't see CX connecting to the outcomes they're accountable for, especially growth. Now, translation is harder than it sounds because the teams that manage your surveys usually don't have account revenue data. And the people who own that data are maybe in finance, sales, digital. Connecting the two takes work, which is part of the reason why only the third one of the 34 could do it. But it is possible. And we've helped teams make this shift. And once the update reports on this executive's number, then the work gets funded instead of nodded at. And that's Tincher Truth number four. How can I get my CEO to care about CX? Is the wrong question because your CEO already cares about customers. They just don't see CX connecting to the account they're accountable for. So what does this mean to you? Your customer data can already tell you where growth is coming from. Once it's connected to the right units. If I could give you just one suggestion, ask the team that manages your surveys to pull their last update to leadership. Count the sentences that name a number one of your executives is accountable for, and have them bring you the account. You'll quickly find out how much of your the update your teams are given was written in the executive language. Now you can find the full research I'm talking about here at heartofthecustomer.com. You can find a lot of that in Do B2B Better. And you can find it in the blog post this came from called What Has Changed Since Do B2B Better? So I invite you to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, or on YouTube or LinkedIn, and give me your feedback. So when I talk about this, what's landing? What didn't, and what do you want to know about next? And most importantly, when you asked your team. To count up every part of the report that connected to numbers your executive is responsible for, what was your team's count? Email me. I'm at jim@heartofthecustomer.com.