Marybeth Alexander has been the Knowledge Goddess and Chief Executive Owl at KnowledgeOwl since she co-founded the company with Pete in 2015. As KnowledgeOwl’s CEO, she's responsible for embodying KnowledgeOwl's mission and values, which include using business as a force for good, cultivating a people-first company, giving excellent service to everyone, and creating awesome knowledge based software.
Questions
· We always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about their journey. So, if you could share with our listeners just a little bit about how you got from where you were to where you are today.
· Could you share with our audience what exactly is KnowledgeOwl, and what do you do on a daily basis?
· What are some of the successes that you've experienced as a CEO of an organization of this nature, and if you were to predict where you see customers experience going in another 3 to 5 years, based on where the technology is currently, what are some of your predictions where that's concerned?
· Now, Marybeth, can you share with our listeners, what's the one online resource, tool, website or application that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
· Can you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that you've read, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently that had a great impact on you, and it could be an impact that affected you personally or professionally.
· Now, can you also share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
· Where can listeners find you online?
· Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share with us a quote. So, do you have a quote that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or you get off track, the quote kind of helps to get you back on track. Do you have one of those?
Highlights
Marybeth’s Journey
Me: Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about their journey. So, if you could share with our listeners just a little bit about how you got from where you were to where you are today.
Marybeth shared that she'll try to do the short version of this. So, she just loves helping people. All of her jobs are her favorite, her favorite jobs have always revolved around people. She loved being a camp counselor, she was a teacher. She also really loved working in hospitality. She loved working at restaurants and bartending and serving folks. And then she transitioned into software support, and she loved helping people there too.
So, she got into software. She was a teacher for a while, and then she transitioned into software, which was actually a pretty good transition, because a lot of the same skills that make you a good teacher for kids also makes you good at doing software support for adults.
So, she grew her leadership in that realm, and she went from being on the support team to being a team lead, to a manager, to a director, and then she got this little opportunity to head up a product, which was a knowledge based product, it was called Help Gizmo at the time.
And she took that opportunity. I was basically like the product owner or manager of that product, and they brought it to market, and then that company didn't want to continue that project, so they ended up giving them the opportunity to buy it, and that is how she accidentally ended up as the CEO of a software company.
She likes to call herself an accidental entrepreneur, because she didn't start out that way, but as luck would have it, she got the opportunity, and now it's been almost 10 years.
What is KnowledgeOwl?
Me: Now, Marybeth, could you share with our audience what exactly is KnowledgeOwl, and what do you do on a daily basis?
Marybeth shared that KnowledgeOwl, they call it knowledge based software, but it was essentially, what knowledge based software is, is a specific type of software that allows you to create a website to share information with whoever your audience is, that is often times your customers.
So, a lot of people use them for their help center and documentation for their software products, but they also sometimes use it for their products for their customers, they have airlines who use them for their help and FAQs, for their customers on their website.
They have customer service teams that use them as a knowledge base for their call center agents. They have lots of companies that use them as their internal knowledge base for all of their playbooks and policies and procedures. So, pretty much what they do every day is help people with these knowledge based websites that help them help their customers, whoever they might be.
Me: I think knowledge base is an extremely good thing for customers, because I do find if a customer has an issue, they tend to do their own troubleshooting first before they actually pick up the phone and call a company or even reach out to a representative at a company. So, if you have a strong knowledge base, you're actually empowering the customer to fix the problem themselves.
Marybeth agreed totally yes, most people do not want to contact your support team, there are a small percentages of people that do, but most people want to be able to self-serve. And when we're talking about giving your customers a great experience and giving them great customer service, a big part of that is allowing them to get help the way they want to get help, and most people would prefer to do it themselves.
Me: So, walk me through, let's choose an industry, let's say, for example, an automotive industry. You sell motor vehicles, for example, and you are trying to create a knowledge base for your team members, so this would be internal with let's say product knowledge, or just general information that customers may call and ask about frequently. Is it that they have to document the information and then give it to you, and you feed it into the knowledge based software, or is that something that you provide for them as well, the research and the documentation that is fed into the knowledge based software?
Marybeth shared that they basically provide the software tool for them. So, their customers like, let's say this automotive, this car service company or automotive company, they would purchase KnowledgeOwl and then somebody on their team would be the one that would put all the content in. So, often times this could be a manager of a team, sometimes you have somebody whose job it is to do like documentation or training, but often times it is like the support team itself, like the people doing the work, they will go in there and document the answers to questions, because on many support teams, you know what team leads end up doing, or like the advanced folks on the team that have been there for a while, is they end up being the go to person and having to answer the same questions over and over again for the other teammates.
So, rather than just answering those same questions over and over again, those people will go to the knowledge based software create a document that says, here's information about this automotive vehicle, here's information like a frequent process that we use. And here's how to do this for the customer, and they'll write it down, so that way their teammates can then reference that or look for it in the knowledge base and get the answer without having to ask them.
So, it speeds up the process and the not just internally, but also it helps the customers get answers faster, because the teammates can find the information they need to help the customers faster.
Me: And your knowledge based software facilitates different formats, so, for example, it could be an audio file, it could be a video file, it could be just a document that the customer is reading.
Marybeth stated exactly. So, it's basically a website. She likes to tell people, pretty much anything you can put in a website, you can put it inside KnowledgeOwl.
So, a lot of times it's going to be text. So, a lot of times it's processes, it's procedures, it's information. But in terms of training in like a video format, you could have audio files in there. You could even like host files. So, if you need to have, like a PDF document or a forum that you need to print and give to a customer, you can store those in the knowledge base as well to make it easy for people to find, print, download it and use that information.
So, essentially, a knowledge base can become sort of the single source of truth for your team. So, rather than having to remember where this forum lives, or where that procedure lives, or where the information about like that car lives, it's all in the same place, so that people can search one place and go to one place to find all of the information they need to do their jobs.
Me: And if the organization already has their own website, Mary Beth, is it that knowledge base has some form of feature that integrates into what they have already, so you live on their server that exists? Or do they have to host their website now through your website?
Marybeth shared that it's not their whole website. So, a knowledge base is typically a separate website. So, you might have your website, which is like www.likemyamazingcompany.com and then you might have your knowledge base for your customers, and that might be on help.myamazingcompany.com or support.myamazingcompany.com so it's actually a separate website that people can go to that is either public or it could be behind a login, because sometimes you only want your logged in customers to access it, or especially if it's an internal knowledge base, you probably only want your employees accessing all of your internal company information.
So, it's often times a separate website. But there are ways you can integrate the knowledge base into your main website if you want to. They have an embeddable help widget, some people go a little bit more advanced with that, but generally it's a separate, standalone website that complements the information on your regular website.
Predictions for Customer Experience in the Next 3 to 5 Years
Me: Now, since you've been in this operation for about 10 years you mentioned earlier, what are some of the successes that you've experienced as a CEO of an organization of this nature, and if you were to predict where you see customers experience going in another 3 to 5 years, based on where the technology is currently, what are some of your predictions where that's concerned?
Marybeth shared that in terms of successes, her successes are all going to be people based because I think, like you, she was looking at Yanique’s website, it's for her, it's all about the people, and giving people a great experience and making sure that not only, like their customers are having a great experience and love working with them and love using their software, but also that the people that work with them, like their staff members are having a great experience working for KnowledgeOwl too and their vendors who are having a great experience working with them as a company.
So, for her, like the biggest success has been building a community of not just customers, but staff members and team members and other vendors and organizations, a really supportive community that cares about each other. But in terms of looking forward in the industry, it's a very interesting time; especially with the word that is on everybody's mind right now is AI.
So, everyone is talking about chatbots, right? So, everybody wants to talk about how they can make a ChatGPT for their company and their customers, and they can automate more of your customer service and their customer experience.
But for them and who knows what it’s going to look like in 3 to 5 years, because the landscape is changing so fast. But what she does strongly feel like is having your company knowledge documented, like having your product, your services, everything in a knowledge base is now more important than ever, because especially with AI, the only way that AI learns is by getting trained.
And one of the best ways to train your AI is to have all of your policies, your procedures, your documentation about your company, your product and your services and your processes written down so that the AI can learn.
So, she thinks what we're going to see over the next 3 to 5 years is even more formal focus on creating and maintaining great documentation, which for many companies, that's always been really important.
So, like most business books you're going to read at the end of the day, the magic secret to like growing your business is to document everything right and to document all your policies and procedures and processes so that you can scale your company, and other people can do what you do.
And that's always sort of been the not very sexy, but honest truth about what great companies look like as they have their policies and procedures and everything well documented. But she thinks what we're going to start to see is that not only are people going to be creating like great documentation for customers and creating great documentation for their teams internally, but they're going to be creating documentation for AI tools as well.
Me: I think that's a very good point that you just brought across the fact that the knowledge base can train the AI, because a lot of times I find that even with chatbots that are attached to organizations, you may start the conversation to resolve an issue, but the bot can answer maybe just the very basic question. And so, a lot of times when I talk to people, they mention that they don't even entertain the bot because they know that they're not going to get the answer they're looking for so they automatically tell the bot they'd like to speak with a live representative, or an agent for the conversation to end with the bot and actually be talking to a live human being in the chat. But maybe that could mitigate the intervention of live agents or representatives if it is that the bot is, as you mentioned, trained fully by the policies that have been documented and simple questions that maybe is embedded in your website, or maybe the customer is not able to quickly identify, the bot can say, “Okay, this is the policy or this is the rate for this,” or whatever the information is as it relates to the organization, again, minimizing the customer having to reach out to someone and speak to them in person or live.
Marybeth agreed and shared that she thinks what's going to be the sort of people of this is we're going to get to a point, probably here in the next 3 to 5 to 10 years, where you might have trouble telling whether you're talking to a real human or a bot. So, think about like the chats on website. So, a lot of bots, you can tell they're a bot because they tell you that they're a bot and it's very simplistic, but the more conversational bots, like, if you've had a chat with ChatGPT, like it's conversational, it can go back and forth with you, you can have an ongoing conversation that builds upon what you were previously talking about.
So, she thinks there is going to be a lot, and it's already starting. There are a lot of AI customer enablement tools, customer service enablement tools that they've been testing, and they've seen other companies using that learn from your knowledge base and your past emails and conversations, what your tone is, how you usually respond, what the correct answer is most likely to be. And there are these tools out there that right now, if they're confident, they can actually reply as an agent would, versus having the agent actually do it. And there's a lot of companies that are very nervous about that with good measure, because we don't want people giving out bad information.
But the agents are suddenly becoming, they're just double checking before the bot sends their answer, but the bots actually writing everything and creating the response and then having that engagement. So, she thinks we might get to a point where sometimes it might be hard to tell whether it's a real person or not.
App, Website or Tool that Marybeth Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Her Business
When asked about an online resource that she can’t live without in her business, Marybeth mentioned if it’s cheating to say KnowledgeOwl?
KnowledgeOwl is interesting because that is where they document not just everything about their products. They have their customer facing knowledge base, which they use to understand how their product works and their customers do as well. But they have all of their internal company documentation in KnowledgeOwl as well. But as a team, they're a remote team, so they're 100% remote, they’re distribute everywhere.
So, their team relies a lot on Slack to connect with each other and have like an online space where they all can all exist and not just talk about work but talk about life and interact with everybody. And it's that necessarily that Slack is that important, because if Slack wasn't there, they'd probably be using Microsoft Teams or some other tool to do that collaboration. But having collaborative, like a space for your team to collaborate together and help each other out and just sort of be together and care for each other as humans is really important, especially we move into an age where there's like less in person interactions and support teams and customer services teams are often going to be distributed. She thinks having that space is really important.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Marybeth
When asked about books that have had a great impact, Marybeth shared that she’s actually going to give you three. So, yes, she’s got three for you. So, number one, it was Zingerman's Guide to Giving Great Service, and she probably first read this about 15 years ago, someone gave it to her, and she said, “What does this have to do? I'm running a software company support team. This is a food service book.” And she read it, and it was the first time that she actually saw someone be able to define the steps to actually giving great service and the steps to actually handle a complaint. And it might have seemed really simple at first, but she has been using the same framework for about 15 years now, and it really works. So, it was the first time she was able to take something that was very conceptional, like great service, and actually give someone a process to follow. So that's number one, is Zingerman's Guide to Great Service.
A compliment to that is Zingerman's Guide to Good Leading, it's a series of books. There's one on building a great business, there's one on being a better leader, there's one on managing ourselves, and another one's about the power of beliefs in business. And these books and series of books have really influenced her whole philosophy about the type of company she wants to build, about the types of teams she wants to build and how she wants to treat people. So, those have been really important to me.
And then her third one, which is more for the business owners or the team leaders on here, but it is Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, it came out last year or the year before, but it has been life changing for her, and sort of organizing her life and figuring out how to grow herself as a leader.
What Marybeth is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something that she’s excited about, Marybeth shared that she thought about this one a little bit, and this might sound a little bit wild, so she’s like a customer service person at heart. Like, support is her jam, she loves customer service, but what she’s really excited about right now is sales and marketing. The reason she’s very excited about sales and marketing is because she’s done a complete 180. When she first started KnowledgeOwl, she thought sales and marketing were bad words, she thought they were icky. They did not have anybody doing sales and marketing, a dedicated team, and they grew their company to this point without really focusing on sales and marketing, because they thought it was something sort of gross, like, she’s a support person, she likes helping people, and she sort of see sales and marketing, or she used think about sales and marketing as sort of this other thing that businesses had to do, but it was sort of gross.
And what she’s realized recently is that sales and marketing can be done good, or it can be done poorly like many things, it's just a tool, and if we think about it through the lens of customer experience and customer service, and how do we add more value for our customers, and how do we give them a better experience in the world?
And how do we do more good, then sales and marketing become a really interesting skill to learn and problem to figure out, because she thinks they can do it in a way that is true to their values. And it's very people centered and is very helpful and is very centered in service. And it's a totally new area for her. So, she’s getting to learn, she’s getting to apply all of her learnings and feelings about customer service and experiences to the realms of sales and marketing, and she’s really excited to figure it all out with her team.
Where can listeners find Marybeth online?
LinkedIn - Marybeth Alexander
LinkedIn – KnowledgeOwl
Website – www.knowledgeowl.com
Email – marybeth@knowledgeowl.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Marybeth Uses
When asked about a quote that she tends to revert to, Marybeth shared that she has many of those. She loves a good mantra. And she thinks her favorite one that she keeps returning to, and she writes it down a lot is….Enjoy yourself.
And to her, it's a quote from a song that she really likes. But in times of adversity, when things seem to her not going well, when she feels like she’s unmoored or a little bit lost, remembering that life is short and that it's shorter than we think, and to remember to enjoy ourselves, and it brings her back to her why. It brings her back to her purpose, and it really helps her to refocus things. So, it brings her back to that positive frame of mind. So, enjoy yourself.
Me: So, Marybeth, just want to extend our gratitude to you for taking time out of your very busy schedule and jumping on our podcast with us today. Conversation was amazing, just learning about Knowledge Owl, and just learning about the impact of a knowledge base and the future of customer experience as it relates to integrating the knowledge base into our different platforms and allowing the customer to be able to self-serve and resolve their issues that much quicker and get information at the tip of their fingers. So, I think it was really insightful, I hope that my listeners gained as much insight from it as I did. I thought it was wonderful, and I just want to thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Please connect with us on X @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Links
• Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service by Ari Weinzweig
• Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstruck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
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Bob Carrothers has 29 years of experience, he facilitates peer-to-peer boards of CEOs and executives, creating environments conducive to skill enhancement, informed decision-making and superior results. Bob is certified as an Emergenetics advisor and Predictive Index practitioner, equipping him with a profound understanding of human behaviour and cognition.
Questions
· So, we always like to ask our guests, in your own words, could you share a little bit about your journey? How you got from where you were to where you are today?
· What would you say maybe if you could pick three overarching tenets or competencies that you believe CEOs need to practice or embrace in order to really achieve the three areas that just mentioned.
· What are some of the key things that make an organization successful?
· Now, Bob, can you also share with our audience, what's the one online resource, tool, website or application that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
· Now, can you also share with our listeners maybe one or two books that you have read, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently, but it had a great impact on you, whether it be personally or professionally.
· Bob, can you share with our audience what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you are really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
· Where can listeners find you online?
· Now, before we wrap our episodes up, Bob, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or you get off track, the quote kind of helps to get you back on track. Do you have one of those?
Highlights
Bob’s Journey
Me: So, we always like to ask our guests, in your own words, could you share a little bit about your journey? How you got from where you were to where you are today?
Bob shared that it's been a very interesting journey. He started out as an entrepreneur; he had companies involved in the meat trading business. So, they bought and sold animal parts, lungs, livers, kidneys, everything that was most people would consider waste from an animal, and then they would resell them to people we knew wanted them, mostly to pet food companies, that's where the tonnage went. And then others to went to Mexico. Others went into sausage making, Chorizo making on the West Coast. They just find a buyer and go do it. And they'd go into a packing house and buy their entire production of lungs or livers or whatever, and then resell it into the pet food canning business. So, it's been an interesting ride.
In 1996 he got out of that business. He sold it to his management team, and they took it over, and they're still running it. And then after that, he started another company that failed miserably. He lost a ton of money. He was crushed, and it was hard and then he looked around, and he'd been a Vistage member, and he loved it. And he knew that with all the ups and downs he’s had in his life, he could help people from making mistakes and doing what he did and living that life. So, he reached out to his past business chair, and he hired him, and that was in 1996, so he’s been doing this ever since, September of 1996, so it's been quite a ride.
Overarching Tenets or Competencies CEO’s Need to Embrace to Unlock Their Potential, Enhance Performance and Achieve Their Goals
Me: Now, you focus on empowering CEOs to unlock their full potential, enhance their performance and achieve their goals. Based on your many years of experience, Bob in this space, working, I'm sure with CEOs and entrepreneurs across different industries, what would you say maybe if you could pick three overarching tenets or competencies that you believe CEOs need to practice or embrace in order to really achieve the three areas that I just mentioned.
Bob shared that he thinks they need to establish a great culture in their company and mind it. Nurture it and protect it, because culture trumps everything, nothing else matters. Your people won't be happy, you won't keep people, you will make your customers angry, your suppliers angry, and you'll do a really bad job because your employees won't care. And so, that's the first thing he would say, is build a strong culture.
The second thing is to hire correctly, be slow to hire and fast to make them available to industry. So, that's really important. If the employee can't do the job they were hired to do, they need to move on and then hire the right people. Put a lot of effort in your hiring process.
And the other one would be, watch the money. You've got to keep track of your cash flow, you got to predict what the cash is going to be down the road. Bigger companies have CFOs to do that, and then they'll report to the CEO. Smaller ones, often the CEO will do it themselves. But you have to do it, because if you run out of cash, you're out of business. It's just really simple, if you can't make payroll, then you're gone.
Key Things for an Organization Success
Me: So, Bob, in working with these different organizations, right? We're trying to establish what are some of the key things that make an organization successful? And so, the customer experience is critical in all businesses regardless of whether or not you have a face-to-face type of interaction or you're just digital and people are communicating with you solely through the internet. But leadership is very important for a business, whether you're a solopreneur or you're a fortune 500 company, regardless of the size, it's driven by the leader in the organization. As it relates to customer experience, if you were to maybe give us an example of a use case, a good use case, example that you've observed over the years in working with these CEOs, what do you think are some of the key things that make them be able to have a successful customer experience, one in which their customers are their brand advocates, their evangelists, their word of mouth advertisers. If that company decided not to advertise for the next two, three years, they would still be doing great business because their customers view them as fans. What would you say are key things in that?
Bob shared that there's one company that comes to mind, and that CEO was brilliant, and the culture in the company was extremely strong. He would walk around his plant every day, and he knew everybody's name and met family members, and he'd walk up to him and just say, “Hey, Charlie, how you doing? How's the family? How's your wife? I heard your son Robbie is sick.” He would do that, and the employees felt that they were cared for.
He never stopped setting goals, he never stopped doing things that would make the work fun. He was trying to reduce shrinkage one day, and it kept bugging him, it was going on for months, and he decided he'd just do a little contest, and he went out and bought an old junker car and a whole bunch of sledgehammers, and every day the group, the employees reduced the amount of shrinkage, they could go out and beat up on the car. And it was just amazing how much fun they were having and how just beating a car, they hit their goal for sure, and it cost the CEO, like, what $500 to do that.
He had other contests like dunk the CFO, where he had one of those dunking tubs. Certain goals were reached, that was out in the parking lot. He saw him with his customers. One of their Vistage speakers impacted him so much that he invited his customers from around the country to come to his plant, see the plant, and hear this speaker present, and because it made such an impact on him, he wanted his customers to be better too, so he thought this speaker could really help him.
What else did he do? Whenever he'd walk up to somebody and they promised to do something for him, he recorded it on his phone, so he'd pull it out and before he saw them, pull up their name and say, “Hey, how are you coming on that project we talked about?” And the accountability went through the roof. Just little things like that, simple things. But he had one goal, that if the company reached so much in revenue sales, he knew that if it did, they'd make extra money, if it was over and above the regular goal, it was big….hairy….audacious goal, and he said, “If you guys hit this, I will take the entire company to Las Vegas.” Because he knew if they increased the revenue that much, the profits would go up enough to pay for the trip and then some. And he was legendary with his employees. Just things like that that are special.
Me: I think one of the things I took away from what you said just now that it's not the big things, it's like always the little things, the minor details, and they go very far away with another human being, because it shows them that you value them, you appreciate them, and they're just not there to milk, to get more money, money, money. But you value them as a person, and you recognize the fact that your success is just as important as their success.
Bob agreed, that's exactly right. That's what it takes to build a great company, is the culture you create. You want people waiting in line to go to work for you.
Me: I know right, that's awesome.
App, Website or Tool that Bob Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about an online resource that he cannot live without, Bob shared that he hates it, but he can't live without it, it's called email. Buries him, but it's the communication is so fast, and we can send documents back and forth, and he doesn't think anybody could live without email now. We all curse it, but it's there.
Me: Agreed, because in the absence of email, we have to go back to posting a letter to your customer or to your friend or family member, and we all know the Postal Service takes forever for you to get that response. So, yeah, email is amazing.
Bob shared that he remembers those days and they'd send off a contract and wait and wait and wait to get it back, just because of the mail, or an invoice. It just was crazy. And then came fax machines, and they were huge. He bought one once and his accountant, and said, “Why do you want that thing? Nobody else has them.” And he said they will, even though they will. And that became huge, and then email took over for that.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Bob
When asked about books that have had a great impact, Bob shared that Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t was a book that had an effect on him. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant is another one. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Me: I'm actually looking at the book right now. It's sitting right in front of me.
Bob shared that that's one of the major ones. And another one he wrote was How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. So, there's several.
What Bob is Really Excited About Now!
When asked about something that he’s really excited about, Bob shared that he’s always excited about cheering, he sees so much, and he loves what he does. As far as he’s not in any training right now, but Vistage offers trainings all the time, and he also does stuff outside of Vistage. But right now, he’s getting ready to go on a holiday in a sprinter van, it's an RV, and that's kind of got his attention. Plus, he’s got two Vistage meetings next week.
Me: So, those are your things that you're working on that you're really excited about. Fantastic.
Where can listeners find Bob online?
LinkedIn - Bob Carrothers
Website – www.vistage.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Bob Uses
When asked about quotes that he tends to revert to, Bob shared he does, he’s a big fan of Albert Einstein, and he had a quote that was, “The same level of thinking that caused a problem is not going to fix the problem.” That's not exact, but that's what it means. And that's so true. Another one is, “Everybody’s a genius. But if you want to teach a fish to fly, they're going to fail and feel they're a loser from then on.” And some people just can't get it. And sometimes when things go wrong, you got to look at the people involved, or the thinking involved and reapproach it with a different level.
Me: Okay, so that second quote is more to say, maybe you need to take a few steps backward just to move forward, just to reevaluate and do it again.
Bob agreed. Reevaluate if it's an employee and they just can't get it. Maybe they're just not set up for it, and it's better to find another position for them, or another area of responsibility, or perhaps they're just not right for your company, like you got to have the right people on the bus as Jim Collins say.
Me: True. If you have the wrong people on the bus, it makes the journey that much harder.
Bob agreed, they got to be in the right seats.
Me: Well, thank you so much Bob for jumping on our podcast today and sharing all of these awesome insights as it relates to Vistage and your journey and just what are some of the key things that makes a leader successful and makes an organization successful as they navigate their customer experience through the journey of their customers lifetime. So, I think your conversation today was extremely insightful, and I just wanted to extend our deepest gratitude to you for taking time to share with us today.
Bob shared that he’s really enjoyed this. Yanique ask great questions and make him think so, thank you.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Links
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Barbara Wardell and Ernesto Cullari run an agency that focuses on geofencing. This embraces a growth hacker mindset that strategically focuses on identifying and amplifying their clients’ strengths while pinpointing weaknesses in the competition, utilizing GPS location data. This approach results in a significant and measurable impact on foot traffic and online engagement, making their efforts truly game changing and successful.
Questions
· Now, we always like to ask our guests in their own words, if you could share a little bit about your journeys, how you got from where you were to where you are today.
· Can you share with our listeners in the most simplest layman terms, what exactly is geofencing?
· Organizations heavily invest in marketing, but then when the person comes to the organization to do business, case in point, let's say you visited Starbucks, and you had to wait for 20 minutes just to get a cup of coffee. You're extremely frustrated, because it's just a small item, you should be in and out in the shortest possible time. How do you tackle that with your clients? Is that something that you deal with as well?
· Do you find that the behavior based on the geographic location or even the culture of the country, impacts how geofencing works?
· Now we'd also like to hear from both of you, what's the one online resource, tool, website or application that you absolutely cannot live without in your business?
· Can you also share with me maybe one or two books that you've read? It could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it has had a great impact on you, whether personally or professionally.
· Now, can you also share with our listeners, what's the one thing that's going on in your lives right now that you are really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
· Where can listeners find you online?
· Now, we always like to wrap our episodes up by asking our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge, you'll tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or you get off track, the quote kind of helps to get you back on track. Do you have one of those?
Highlights
Barbara and Ernesto’s Journey
Me: Now, we always like to ask our guests in their own words, if you could share a little bit about your journeys, how you got from where you were to where you are today?
Barbara Wardell: Barbara shared that she and Ernesto met during Covid at a Halloween party, believe it or not, before they started their company together, they became friends. And her journey is she’s a mom of two, and she was in the medical industry, specialty medicines for a long time, and then Covid hit, and then she and Ernesto met at a Halloween party, became friends, and then they started Cullari & Wardell, a geofencing ad agency, and a little over two years, they've been killing it, so growing small businesses. So, they're really lucky to do that.
Ernesto Cullari: Ernesto stated that as Barbara said, they met during Covid, they both have a medical background. For years, he was a Surgical OR Med Rep, so he would be working in the operating room with physicians utilizing novel technology to do abdominal body wall repair, post breast reconstruction after cancer and things like that. During the day, he moonlit as a professional songwriter, so he had songs on Disney radio, country radio, that he wrote for other artists.
And along that journey, he became a songwriter. So, the mystery during his creative time was always wondering how to sort of growth hack, how to break an artist out into the mainstream. And they had a lot of success doing that. Paulie Litt from the show Hope & Faith, ended up having a number one song on Disney radio, which they wrote for him, and then had a top 100 song, and then top 15 country music song that he wrote for an artist named Bailey Grey.
And so, it does lead them up to Covid, because when Covid struck, part of their content, so he got more into advertising and marketing, and a lot of their clients just dropped off. And the problem that needed to be solved was how do you rebuild foot traffic, particularly in a market where the government won't let you open, when they do let you open, people are going to be slow to come back to retail.
So, what do we do?
So, putting that growth hacker hat back on to when he was a songwriter, he looked into geofencing, and that was about 4 years ago, and then 2 years into his journey of mastering, doing his 10,000 hours of studying geofencing technology, he and Barbara met, and it became a passion of theirs, and throughout their conversation, to help small businesses, to help them bring people back in.
People like the retail experience, people like the in-person experience, and geofencing is a powerful tool that uses satellite technology to draw virtual fences around locations of interest. It could be your competitors, and they use that to capture their devices to send ads to their devices when they come into one of their locations after seeing one of your ads, the satellite pings them and alerts them that a new GPS verified visit has taken place. And he and Barbara do about 5000 satellite verified visits in the US, Canada and Australia every month.
What is Geofencing?
Me: Now, for those of our listeners that are tapping into this episode when it's broadcasted and they're getting a chance to listen into this awesome content, can you share with them in the most simplest layman terms, what exactly is geofencing?
Ernesto Cullari: stated that in the simplest terms, it is a form of advertising that uses your phone and when you walk into a location that they've identified with a satellite, he’s drinking a cup of coffee at a coffee shop that he bought it at. And then in his surrounding areas, there's about 7 other coffee shops. Well, if he wants to show why he’s better, he would use geofencing to draw a virtual fence around his competition. Once someone walks into a competing coffee shop with their mobile device, he can then capture their device and then send ads to their device. And the wonderful part is, is when after seeing his ad, come back to his coffee shop, he could say, “Wow, because of my ads, because I used geofencing to target their devices in my competition stores, I've therefore just measured 50 visits this month.”
So, it's critical because none of us are made of money, and advertising dollars for the small business is scarce, so we want to use our money wisely. And big companies like Chipotle, Chipotle, by the way, the CEO of Chipotle just got hired at Starbucks.
Me: I saw that yesterday.
Chipotle during Covid, utilized, he thinks it was one of their vice presidents came up with this idea, “Hey, let's use geofencing. I heard it works.” Well, during Covid, Chipotle was able to triple their curb side pickup from using geofencing. They saw where other people were picking up food, and then they decided to target those locations and let them know that, “Hey, Chipotle has curb side pickup.”
So, Chipotle did so well that Starbucks needs to learn from them. As you know, a lot of Starbucks locations have been closing throughout the country, and they picked off talent from Chipotle, and he has no doubt that that talented team is going to be helping Starbucks turn around, but geofencing is part of that story.
Me: So, now our listeners have a good idea of what geofencing is and also what your organization does.
How Does Using GeoFencing as a Marketing/Advertising Tool Affect CX?
Me: Now let's tie all of that back into the customer experience, right? Because we're all about navigating the customer's experience. So, you have marketed and advertised to the organizations to say, hey, you can come to this organization based on the geofencing marketing initiatives that you've put in place. Now, can you share with me how it is that the customer experience is addressed in this for example, like with your clients, because I find, for example, people spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising, not sure what the cost point is for geofencing compared to traditional media like the radio or newspaper, if it's significantly cheaper. But I find that a lot of times, organizations heavily invest in marketing, but then when the person comes to the organization to do business, case in point, let's say you visited Starbucks, and you had to wait for 20 minutes just to get a cup of coffee. You're extremely frustrated, because it's just a small item, you should be in and out in the shortest possible time. How do you tackle that with your clients? Is that something that you deal with as well?
Barbara Wardell: shared that for their end, it's the advertising end, they don't deal with the customers per se. The places that people go with their smartphones is indicative highly of the products that they buy. So, when they go into a geofence, what they see is they're open on an app, because they're on apps or on the wide-open web, they’re not on Facebook, Instagram, Google. So, when they actually go into that geofence and they're on an app, they will see an ad for one of their customers, and from that, if they toggle it or click it, they will see a map how to get there. Once they go into that store, whether it's that day or 90 days later, the satellite will ping them. So, that part is their end. What they go into the store is on the customer itself of how they treat their customer. And Ernesto has some insight on that as well.
Ernesto Cullari: shared that when they do a consultation with a client, one of the first things they ask, they're one of the largest advertisers for laundromats in the world, so small business owners have discovered that owning a laundromat is a very good business, you're serving your community, you're providing a great service, but it's very important to set up realistic expectations. So, he and Barbara, when they consult a company, they want to find out even,
“What kind of doors you have?”
“Do you have doors that are particularly when moms and dads are coming in with their kids, are the doors automatic? Are they wide doors?”
“Are you operating new machines?”
Because they want to set up realistic expectations for the end consumer. So, when they work with one of their clients, they do ask them how their operations run. They've been very fortunate to attract top operators in communities across the US, but when it comes to restaurants and spirits companies and hotels and HVAC and doctors and things like that, service providers, they do want to make sure that the product that they say they're offering is the end user experience that the customer has. But as Barbara said, it's not their responsibility to make sure they do operations well, but they advise them, “Hey, get your operations down, and let's make sure the promise that we give is matched with the in-store experience.”
Barbara Wardell: shared that that’s something they think that is very important. So, that's why they do a lot of research before they take on a client. They ask them a lot of questions to make sure that they're doing what they're promising in their ads, because you don't want that customer to come in and say, “Okay, this is not what the promise was, right?” Then they won't come back.
Ernesto Cullari: shared that they're concerned about their numbers; in order to do well for you, they need to be telling the truth. There needs to be truth in advertising, and they don't want their numbers as a company to be impacted because they're committed to delivering as much as 5000 visits a month, and if their clients are not on their end, providing the proper customer experience, it does impact him and Barbara. So, they're very competitive, they want to make sure they uphold the things that they say they're going to do, and they tend to advise their clients 100% of the time to do the same to make sure they're matching the experience with their ad promise.
The Impact of Geofencing
Me: So, in the feedback that you just provided, it got me thinking to the fact that, do you find geofencing it's most effective or impactful based on your geographical location. So, is it that you primarily operate in the United States, in North America? And do you find that geofencing would be different based on, let's say, a customer who is in Nigeria, in Africa, or a customer who is in Kingston, Jamaica, in the Caribbean? Do you find that the behaviour based on the geographic location or even the culture of the country, impacts how geofencing works? Is that data that you're able to provide as well to the clients?
Barbara Wardell: Yes. So, they're right now in Australia, Canada and the United States, and there is a culture difference when you advertise in a different country, they found that a lot has to do, they do a lot of studies before they break into another country, to make sure that they understand the behaviours and kind of they do a listening device that kind of listens to the area to see, because they track mobile foot traffic, right? So, that's one of the things that they do to work on their geofencing, so they already know when they go into that area, what the culture is like, and also talking to the customer as well to understand the area. And also, they do a listening device or a foot traffic study to understand the area that they're targeting.
Ernesto Cullari: Agreed, Barbara said it perfectly. They do set up listening campaigns, and it's basically a beacon to measure, he'll give you an example, Australia, for listeners that haven't been there, he and Barbara have not been there, but when they look at it via satellite, you have these communities that are densely populated, and then you have hundreds of 1000s of acres of wide open space. So, they really need to do due diligence and measure the amount of devices that are available in an area before they market to them. So now, they haven't tested yet whether this works in Africa or South Africa, but right now, they're for sure it works all throughout Asia and it's a matter of so say, Nigeria, for example, they would have to set up a listening campaign, they would have to measure the amount of devices that are available and then determine what kind of devices are they. Are they iPhones, Samsungs and Androids, or are they flip phones and some other mixture of devices and that will impact what kind of the ads they use.
Me: All right. So, that definitely answers my question, and I think it will help to guide the listeners as well in terms of if they're small business owners, or even working in organizations with small business owners that they can definitely identify if this is something that would benefit them and benefit creating more traffic for their organization, generating more customers and hopefully impacting their customer experience.
App, Website or Tool that Barbara and Ernesto Absolutely Can’t Live Without in Their Business
Barbara Wardell: When asked about online resource that they cannot live without in their business, Barbara stated that she thinks it's the foot traffic study only because it gives them a lot of information before they even launch a campaign for any one of their customers. It is something that they can see a half hour before and a half hour after the customers, where they go from that that area, or that specific customer, and also for a year, they can go back for a year to look at that traffic and see where those customers go.
Ernesto Cullari: He thinks for himself, he has his hand in a lot of working on the creatives for clients. And even though there are wonderful platforms out there, like the whole Adobe Suite, which includes Premier, Photoshop, Lightroom and all that, and Adobe Illustrator, and he thinks they're all great. But he likes the prosumer which are applications that anybody off the street could use. So, if you're a small business owner or even a big business owner, and you want an application where you don't need to go to your team or your assistant, you want to be able to do something yourself, Canva is a wonderful platform that he has actually, when he works in Canva after working in something like Adobe, his turnaround time sometimes in Canva is so much quicker because it's made for dummies.
Canva is made for dummies. So, he loves Canva, and also, they manage designers, and those designers, they work in Creatopy, again, so that's a prosumer, anybody off the street could use that website, it makes great looking html5 ads.
And again, as someone who manages creatives, if he doesn't like something, can go into Creatopy, and he could fix it himself. So, he thinks no matter where you are in your journey as a business owner, whether you manage a fortune 100 company and you have to deal with your admin, your marketing men and women, or you own a small business and you have to do it yourself, or you're hiring an agency like them, Canva and Creatopy, in addition to the Adobe Creative Suite, are just wonderful platforms.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Barbara and Ernesto
Ernesto Cullari: When asked about books that have had an impact, Ernesto shared that he read Confessions of an Advertising Man by Ogilvy, which he thinks is one of the greatest books on advertising you can read. But also, it's not just advertising, it's in general, if you're someone who needs to communicate to the masses or to discrete audiences, small audiences, learning the art of communication is important, and he thinks Confessions of an Advertising Man, he have found invaluable.
In addition to Sun Tzu's Art of War, sometimes you have to crush your competition, and you have to be able to have the stomach for it, and strategy is necessary. And Sun Tzu’s The Art of War he would also say. And then the Bible.
Barbara Wardell: She has to say one of her favorite is Wabi Sabi Love, it's about being in the present and appreciating everything that’s in your life at that moment, because it could be gone tomorrow, and she’s had that experience, she’s read a ton of marketing books, but that's one that's close to her heart.
Ernesto Cullari: He shared that Yanique asked earlier about cost effectiveness, and the cost per acquisition and things like that. How does this compare to other forms of advertising? So, he’s sure a lot of listeners out there have for various reasons, could be for charity, could be for advertising, could be for marketing. They've engaged in Facebook, Google advertising to promote an event or product. So, he can tell you, doing the engagement using Facebook and then starting with other forms of advertising since then, and he can tell you that geofencing, pound per pound is the Mike Tyson, is the absolute Mike Tyson of advertising. Everyone else is a lightweight. There is no censorship.
So, if you run political ads, you will face no censorship of any sort on the geofencing side, unlike Facebook and Google, who will silence you if they don't agree with your viewpoints. And in terms of reach and measurement, dollar for dollar, there's just nothing as effective as geofencing.
So, on a $500, he doesn't recommend only spending this, but on a $500 budget per month, you can end up with 20 people coming through your door. I do recommend for five-mile radius that you spend at least $1,000 on your market, that way, if you know the cost per customer, meaning how much money your average customer spends, you have the opportunity to 10 to 30x your return on investment depending on what the value of a new customer is for you.
In some of their verticals that they work with, the value of a new customer is $40,000 so on the $1,000 ad spend, if you gain one new client a month, that's a quite impressive return on investment. For other clients they have in the laundry industry, some of their clients are worth 1200 to 2500 a year. So, if they send the 30, 40, 50 customers a month, then that again, is quite a handsome return on investment, agreed.
What Barbara and Ernesto is Really Excited About Now!
Barbara Wardell: When asked about something that they are really excited about, Barbara shared that they just launched which they're really excited about, their dashboard for their clients so that they can go in and see the reporting instead of them emailing them their reports, so now that they can go into the system and actually on their time and actually look at and see their results of their campaign.
Ernesto Cullari: He shared that he’s excited about he and Barbara just got finished running a fundraiser from his mother's orphanage in the Philippines. She operates what's called Street Kids Philippine Missions, and she's been there for 15 years with her husband, Matt, and they have rescued kids that were in danger of being sex trafficked, that were eating out of garbage cans, that were basically destitute. And it's their 15th year, they just successfully raised $20,000 and that was simply an online campaign where they used their podcasting studio to talk about what his mom does, and Matt does there. And they're pretty proud of being able to use their resources to help kids that face sex trafficking that would otherwise be destitute. And he would say he’s most happy and proud about that development.
Where can listeners find you online?
Website – www.cullarimedia.com
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Barbara and Ernesto Uses
Ernesto Cullari: When asked about a quote to they tend to revert to, Ernesto shared from The Art of War, “He whose forces are of one mind will be victorious.”
Barabra Wardell: She shared that mainly, she always tells herself to be in the present moment and not get sidetracked by other things that are going on. But she can't think of a quote right now.
Me: Thank you so much for taking time out of your very busy schedules and hopping on our podcast and sharing all of these great insights as it relates to geofencing and the impact that it can have on 10x’ing your business, getting new clients, the advantage that it has over traditional media, advertising and just the opportunity for you to understand your customer base a little bit more, get an idea of where they're coming from and why they're coming to you, so you can continue to build on that and even exceed their expectations. So, I think it was a great conversation, and I just wanted to extend my deepest gratitude to you both.
Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest
Links
• Confessions of an Advertising Man by Dave Ogilvy
The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience
Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners
Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC’s of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”
The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty.
This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately!
This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others.
Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!
Alan Versteeg, an engineer turned sales management expert, initially approached the sales world with skepticism, but soon turned it into a thriving career by applying the engineering principles of cause and effect to sales and sales management. This success led him to co-founding Growth Matters, where Alan and his team have developed over 2,000 sales managers across 45+ countries and diverse industries.
Known for his candid and light-hearted approach, Alan's passion for the sales profession shines through in his insightful talks, leaving audiences engaged with his wisdom, expertise, and memorable one liners.
Questions
· Now, could you start by sharing with our listeners a little bit about your journey, how it is that you got from where you were to where you are today.
· Can you share with us maybe two overarching themes that you try to help sales professionals master in terms of their mindset, to get them to where you need them to be in order to master their sales?
· What are some barriers that you believe a lot of salespeople face, why it is you believe they're not successful?
· Now, Alan, could you also share with our listeners, what's the one online resource, tool, website or application that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
· Can you also share with our listeners maybe two books that you've read? It could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it still has had a great impact on you.
· Could you also share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you are really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
· Where can listeners find you online?
· Just want to ask you as well, Alan, in your experience, in the journey of your lifetime, if you have a quote or saying that during times of adversity or challenge, if for any reason, you got derailed. Do you have a quote or a saying that once repeated or just remembered it helps to get you back on track?
Highlights
Alan’s Journey
Me: Now, could you start by sharing with our listeners a little bit about your journey, how it is that you got from where you were to where you are today.
Alan shared that he started as an electronic engineer, it wasn't his fault, he grew up watching Airwolf Night Rider and MacGyver, so he thought that's what he'd be doing. Unfortunately, he lost his dad when he was quite young, he was about 12 years old, but he was an engineer, so he thought that'd be a good thing to do. But he was doing it for about 3 years after graduating, and he read a book called You're Born an Original, Don't Die a Copy by John Mason, and he said, “If you passionately hate what you're doing for more than 2 weeks, you need to stop,” and he'd been doing it for two years.
And a friend of his suggested he goes into sales, which he then tried and please if your listeners don't drop off now, but he got asked to leave his first sales jobs, but it was frustrating. As an engineer, he believed in cause and effect. He believes that there's things you do that get you certain outcomes. He was doing everything they told him to do, but he couldn't find a way to get through, he'd be good at his product, he was passionate to what he was doing, but he wasn't able to succeed.
And then he worked under a manager, he said to him, “Alan, is sales a job or a profession?” So, he knew the right answer, the right answer was, it's a profession. And he said, “Well, how hard did you study for this profession?”
And then the penny drops, and from there on out, been a passionate reader, 50 to 60 books a year, generally related to psychology, self-development and sales and over time, realized that the big change in sales is sales management, and that's a short view of his journey to where he was and how he got here.
Mindset Needed for Sales Professionals
Me: Now you deal with a lot of sales professionals, and I can imagine it starts with their mindset. Can you share with us maybe two overarching themes that you try to help sales professionals master in terms of their mindset, to get them to where you need them to be in order to master their sales?
Alan stated that it's a great question, and it speaks to the tone of your podcast. So, the first mindset they have to own is that “Selling won't help, but helping will sell.” That the sale is the reward for an intent to create value. And that's the starting point when we realize that we are service orientated, that we're there to drive value into the client's business or life, that there's something specifically we're trying to do, that were truthfully customer centric it's not just a word, and we realize that selling won't help, but helping will sell.
You'll find that salespeople do really well. There's a wonderful book called Selling With Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud by Lisa Earle McLeod, and it shows the research behind the top performing sales professionals globally sell with that noble purpose, with an idea to serve. So, it's definitely one of them.
The second one is probably an extension, he said to sales professionals, “If you believe in the product you sell and you believe it can add value to the person you're serving, then it would be borderline negligent to avoid offering them that value.”
Many salespeople, specifically today are fearful of cold calling or proactive sales calling or reaching out or picking up a phone or speaking to someone, and they take on a very much non-human sales approach, as opposed to going, “I believe, with certainty and conviction that what I have to offer will make their lives or their business easier, and I'm here to help, and helping will sell. So, I'm going to depart from that point.”
And what you find is doing that, apart from that point, the skills, the body language, all the risks that start to develop quite naturally, but often we avoid that, we try to train the skill, but we avoid the mindset.
Barriers To Overcome as Salespeople
Me: So, once you tackle their mindset, now you have to ensure that what they're selling, as you mentioned before, is actually helping the customer and adding value to the customer's life. What are some barriers that you believe a lot of salespeople face, why it is you believe they're not successful?
Alan shared that he thinks the big barrier specifically in professional selling is conviction of the value proposition, and before that is clarity. And he'll give a couple of examples.
When he speaks to business leaders, they often say to him, “You know what Alan, the challenge with our sales teams are they just don't understand our value proposition.”
And he says, okay, great. What is your value proposition? And they struggle to articulate it. Now, if you think about this, why is it that entrepreneurs can sell quite effectively without ever having been trained in that skill, and the reality is they have clarity and conviction of their value proposition. He thinks with many sales professionals, we're teaching them the product, we're not teaching them the impact it has on the customer's life.
Once we buy into the impact, once we have the conviction, selling is a natural part of how we are as humans and Dan Pink wrote that book To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others.
And his (Alan) example is we have a brand over there, it's called Woolworths, it's a high-quality brand, high quality food brand. And if you said to anyone, “But why shopping in Woolworths? They're so expensive.” They dive into a defense, without being paid by this company, they will sell very hard the value of doing that.
The same could be said for someone who's an Apple phone fan. And he can continue, once we have conviction of something, the ability and need to persuade is actually quite natural. So, he thinks what's missing from an individual's perspective is that conviction of the mindset.
From a corporate, it's the fact that we speak about customer centricity, but none of our measurement metrics or meetings actually align to that.
Me: Now, I found that in a lot of organizations, they're heavily sales driven, right? I find it as a customer service trainer when companies hire me to come in and train their team, especially the leadership teams in customer service, or even customer experience design or customer journey mapping, there's a lot of emphasis that I hear them talking that they have these exorbitant sales targets to meet on a month to month basis, and with these targets that they have to meet, they don't have as much time to give to customer centricity or to give to the experience, because it's all about meeting the target. How do you strike that balance as a salesperson? What would be your recommendation?
Alan shared that there'd be two components. The first would be at an organizational lens, speaking to what you're saying. He thinks organizations have forgotten that when you take care of the customers, the number takes care of itself. So, we are so focused on the month, on the quarter, on the year, we're not focused on the value, and that's a shift that needs to happen.
But practically, the way that shift happens is in the account planning process, when we start treating our customers and accounts and saying, what is the value we're delivering. Many companies go, what more can we sell them? What's the white space we can sell into? What does that look like? And that's the big organizational.
From a salesperson’s perspective, the only thing you can do is you need to figure out how to allocate your effort. And the way he says that is you have to beat everyone equally but handle them differently. You have to segment your customers, otherwise you can't take care of the ones that need to be taken care of, and your competitor is going to snatch them up. And in any sales business, he’s ever worked with, if you lose, and it's generally about 10%, if you lose about 10% of your customers, you lose about 90% of your revenue.
But organizations are just focused what's the next sale, what's the next sale, what's the next sale? And what happens is, we're putting two barrels on the truck, and three barrels are falling off the truck because we're not focused on the customer service.
And we almost see it as something separate, and it's not. The way he articulates this is there's a thing called the value gap, it's the gap between what customers expect and what they experience. And it is everybody's job in the organization to close that gap.
It's not, “Hey, sales go set the expectation. Hey, service go and deliver against that expectation.” It's an organizational mindset that we exist to close the gap between the customers expect and what they experience.
And he thinks their leadership needs to start realizing that taking care of customers, the numbers take care of themselves, and that talking to a spreadsheet or talking to a CRM system or talking to data doesn't change people's behaviour.
So, leadership needs to take a different perspective on this and going, what is it we do now that lays the soil in the seeds for the numbers we need?
App, Website or Tool that Alan Absolutely Can’t Live Without in His Business
When asked about online resource that he can’t live without in his business, Alan shared that right now ChatGPT. He thinks that we are negating its value in sales if we're using it incorrectly. So, he’ll give you a context.
As salespeople, we need to be creative and optimistic, and we're not fans of admin. So, the good news for sales professionals is a lot of our admin is going to be replaced by technology, but that's going to leave a lot of sales professionals wanting because what do you do with the time that you used to spend putting your data. But he really leverages the tool to shorten his learning curve, understanding a customer, understanding what the challenges are, understanding key things. It's a tool to summarize, it doesn't replace him as it shouldn't, it enhances him.
And he was listening to one of Yanique’s earlier podcasts, you talk about the human-to-human connection, and there's this thing now where we talk about human-to-human selling. And he’s like, well, if you think human to human selling is new, then you haven't been around for millennia, because that's what it is. It's a human-to-human task enhanced by technology. But right now, if he talks about probably 60% to 70% of his time is given back to him because he knows to leverage ChatGPT.
Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Alan
When asked about books that have had an impact, Alan shared that that's a tough question with all the books he read, but he’s going to give one that he always recommends. The first one is called The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness by Jeff Olson, and the premise of the book is that simple disciplines practiced consistently over time, lead to a life of greatness, and simple errors in judgment made consistently over time, lead to a life of blame. There's no Hollywood moment, there's not one big movement, they're just simple disciplines. Look at any leader, any sports hero, any person who succeeds in their profession, they practice the disciplines. So, there's definitely one that guides his life.
And then the other one is a book called The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller, and it's really about forgetting this construct of work life balance and finding out what's the one thing I can do such that by doing everything else is easier or unnecessary. And it talks about this work life counterbalance, and how you just keep the things that matter, you don't make them extreme fluctuations and the things that don't matter can be extreme. You can be heavily buried in a work project for three months, but during that time, don't forget your health, your family time, the things that matter. Just tone it down a bit, not all the way down. Those are two books, he'd say, personally, really drove him.
As a business professional, recently read that 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan, wonderful resource for anyone that's listening, that is an entrepreneur or business owner, 10x Is Easier Than 2x.
What Alan is Really Excited About Now!
Me: Now, Alan, could you also share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you are really excited about, either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
When asked about something that he’s excited about, Alan shared that he’s recently moved to a smaller coastal towns that's been really good for him personally, but the big thing happening for him business wise, is there's a very large global brand that they've managed to secure that's 10x’ing our business, which is a plan they had based on that book that he’s read, and starting to see how that effort, energy and focus is paying off, is really rewarding. When you read a lot of books, you can get sometimes caught up in the story and not in the action.
And what's really great to see, in a proud moment for their business, is now really starting to take on some recognized global brands who are looking at effectively three guys from South Africa and saying, “We want to partner with you to do this.” So, it's a proud moment that's come, your overnight success is the longest night of your life.
But really what it's been powerful is seeing the practices that they put in place now starting to bear fruit. And when you say, take care of the customers, the number takes care itself, it's actually quite prolific, how?
And you know this, he’s preaching to the converted, but when you understand that the only thing that matters is how customers experience you, then everything else becomes a lot easier, because their ability to grow is because they just have a track record where they phone a customer, and they love what they've done with them. And that doesn't mean it's easy to scale, it's still hard to scale. But he thinks that'd be the big thing right now, is seeing how by applying certain principles, you can stretch your own mindset, stretch your own goals, stretch your own vision for your business, and really start to play where you always believed you can.
Where can listeners find Alan online?
LinkedIn – Alan Versteeg
Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Alan Uses
When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Alan shared that he has quite a few, but one of his favourites, because of its depth is, “How you do anything, is how you do everything.” And the reason that's so important is it's easy to be in a good mood when times are good, it's easy to be of a good character when times are good, it's easy to be a pleasant person when times are good, but when things are challenging, that's where your character gets tested.
And how you do anything, is how you do everything. And he says to leaders all the time, Richard Branson said it so well, “The best way to take care of your customers is to take care of your employees.” Because the minute you take care of the employees, the customers feel that. And it's because how you do anything, is how you do everything.
You can't be polite to your customers but rude to the person waiting at you at a restaurant or trying to help you at the airport. Airports are so fascinating because everyone complains to people who are really just trying to get you somewhere safely and within strict guidelines that people, they don't treat people well.
And he believes that how you do anything, is how you do everything. And in challenging times, that tests you, can I remain of good spirit?
Can I remain a good demeanor?
Can I remain patient as a person when things are difficult?
Can I maintain my faith?
Because it's easy to maintain my faith when things are great, it's difficult when you're in the lion's den, and that's for him, a quote that just guides him and says, just remember, they still shape your character, this is a test of your character and a bad day for the ego, is a beautiful day for the soul. It's time to grow.
Me: Well, thank you, Alan, so much for hopping on this podcast and sharing all of these great insights with us. It was very insightful to understand your perspective as it relates to sales and customer service, and to reinforce a lot of what we do talk about on this podcast, Navigating the Customer Experience as it relates to ensuring that the customer experience is not just managed effectively on the outside, but it needs to start on the inside. And you said it beautifully when you gave Richard Branson's quote that if you take care of your people on the inside, and they'll definitely take care of your customers on the outside. So, I think it was a really great conversation and I just really wanted to extend our deepest gratitude for your participation in our conversation today.
Alan shared an extended thanks to Yanique and the work she’s doing in this space. One of the things that he definitely picks up in everything Yanique shared, the customer experience is not a thing, it's a culture and when we actually realize this, everything becomes easier, because it seems obvious, it does take a lot of work, as you know, it's a profession. But when companies understand it, the only reason we exist is to create value for customers, then the customer experience is the report card. So, thank you so much for the work you're doing in this space and for having him on the show.
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Links
• You’re Born an Original, Don’t Die a Copy by John Mason
• To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink
• The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness by Jeff Olson
• The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller
• 10x Is Better Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan
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