June 27, 2023 • 54 mins
Most of human suffering is related to an unwillingness to have difficult conversations.
Today we discuss how communication, authenticity and a “Team Sport'' culture lead to fulfillment and increased revenue. We speak with Friendbuy’s VP of Revenue, Adam Ferris, about his approach to holding the customer accountable and giving them what they want while diving deep and showing care through continuity.
Join us as we break down:
More information about Adam Ferris and today’s topics:
Today we discuss how communication, authenticity and a “Team Sport'' culture lead to fulfillment and increased revenue. We speak with Friendbuy’s VP of Revenue, Adam Ferris, about his approach to holding the customer accountable and giving them what they want while diving deep and showing care through continuity.
Join us as we break down:
- Why Empowerment is more effective than FOMO when drawing in a customer
- Why it takes a village to close a deal, not just Sales
- How to increase revenue with win/loss conversations
- When NOT to incorporate AI
More information about Adam Ferris and today’s topics:
- LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adampferris/
- Company Website: https://www.friendbuy.com/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
The single most important thing you cando today is to create and deliver a
better experience for your customers. Learnhow sales, marketing and customer success experts
create internal alignment, achieved desired outcomes, and exceed customer expectations in a personal
and human way. This is theCustomer Experience Podcast. Here's your host,
(00:24):
Ethan Butte. Revenue is a teamsport that's the philosophical and practical approach of
today's guest. He's an advisor,investor, mentor, and board member for
several companies. He built his careeras a sales leader at companies like Caltura,
DUTA, and Sorcery Technologies. Todayhe serves as VP of Revenue at
friend By, a referral and loyaltyprogram for direct to consumer and B to
(00:49):
B brands. Among the places Ihope to go maybe a little overambitious,
but aligning around go to market strategy, understanding our customers and their intrinsic motivations
in the middle way between efficiency andeffectiveness, and serving both D two C
and B to B brands. Withthat, Adam Ferris, Welcome to the
Customer Experience Podcast. Thank you Ethan. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be
(01:11):
here. Thanks for having me.Yeah, I don't know if we'll get
to cover all that ground, butI hope too, because I know you
have a lot of helpful ideas aboutall of them. But we'll start where
we always do, which is customerexperience. When I say that, what
does it mean to you? Adam? Yeah, that's a loaded question for
me. I got my MBA intwo thousand and five, before marketing automation
existed. You know, I wastaught that customer experience means everything your ORG
(01:34):
does to obsess over the customer,manage their journeys and serve their needs.
And while I agree with that philosophically, I agree with most of that,
it doesn't encapsulate for me the nuancesbetween B two C and B to B
from my biased perspective as a goto market revenue leader, and nor is
(01:56):
it really actionable from an OPS standpointand how you execute on that throughout the
buyer journey across your org, inyour mission, etc. And I believe
that the you know, at thefundamental core of who we are as humans
were emotional beings and we expect,you know, what do we want as
(02:17):
humans? We expect our interactions tobe personal and continuous. And I use
this term equal parts debit and credit. And that's what I want out of
my relationships with my partner, mywife, my friends, my family,
my neighbors, my teammates, mycustomers. And that's what our customers want,
(02:38):
you know, whether you're D twoC or B to B. And
so what I believe CX starts withis it really starts with you as a
person and the sales cycle. Itstarts with your brand and really obsessing over
who you are as a brand,what you stand for, and how you
execute on that mission, and howyou empower your team to find their purpose
(03:02):
through that mission so they can exudethat mission and interact with customers throughout their
journey, you know, in avery human and emotional and personal way.
And so I believe it doesn't startwith a customer first. It really takes
a lot of self reflection in orderto create a better customer experience to be
(03:22):
able to execute what I what Ijust mentioned, what kind of person do
you want to be? What kindof brand do you want to be?
And then how do you apply thatand not personalize it? So much good
stuff in there, and it isfar more practical than I think some people
might give credit to. I thinksome people when they hear words like mission
or exude, I think some ofthe more hardcore people would say, that's
(03:44):
not that's that's actually far more actionablethan a lot of other approaches. And
I really appreciate above all your insideout approach to this, Who am I,
who are we? Who are weas a brand in a company?
What motivates us from a mission perspective, and then how does that manifest in
the experience that we have. WhatI'm going to infer also from what you
(04:05):
said and kind of turn it backto you for your thoughts or response to
it, is that a lot ofthe experience is driven by human to human
interaction. I think a lot ofthe emotional resonance and the impression, some
of the brand impression, or someof the experiential takeaways really are to I
(04:26):
mean to use the word humans oremotional creatures talk about the importance of human
to human moments even in some ofthese more product led motions that aren't as
maybe direct and interactive. But Istill think that even in scenarios where the
human to human moments aren't necessarily builtin to be core part of the process,
(04:48):
perhaps as they are for friend buying, as they are for bomb bomb.
You know, most people wind uptalking to a team member of ours
before they make their decision about howbest to proceed. I think those human
to human moments, as frequent orinfrequent, as intentional or unintentional as they
might be, probably leave greater emotionalresonance and therefore greater impact on the perceived
(05:10):
experience. Yeah, there's a lotto impact there. I'll get to the
PLG emotion in a bit. I'vebeen in B to B SaaS for about
eleven years and to go to marketposition, and we put up these friction
points, and I think about thefunnel as Jaco from Winning by Design thinks
about it, the bow tie funnel. And we have awareness building and education.
(05:31):
Whether we educate our customers, theyself educate, then you convert them
and then they there's time there's adoptionor activation. There's time to first impact
or time to value, and thenthere's recurring impact. And if you think
about those, you know, tosimpivide six different stages in the bow tie
funnel. We put up these naturalfriction points that with these different job functions,
(05:55):
the SDR the AE and some sortof support system, then the onboarding
team, then it may be theCS team, and then the renewal's team,
and there's a lot of touch pointsthere, and it's really difficult to
create continuity for customers. They customerswant don't want to have to retell their
story, retell their problem statement,talk about their milestones and goals and rehash
(06:18):
that at every stage, or beinterrogated at every stage, or feel like
they're being interrogated. And so howdo you create continuity for a customer when
we've created all these job functions andB to B SaaS And that's really really
difficult, and a lot of thatcan be solved with systems and handoff processes
and stuff like that. Then wecan talk about PLG and the product.
(06:40):
You know, our product has alot of work, you know for a
PLG motion. When I go intoa product, I don't know what to
do, you know, I don'tknow what the first step that my product
wants me to take is or whatI should be doing, and how I
get guided through through the product andexperience surprise and delight. For example,
rip just I just got paid Ithink last week on Sinco de Mayo and
(07:04):
Rippling had this, you know,a JavaScript animated JavaScript element that was a
pinata dunking piniata that was giving mecandy, and that was that was I
made me laugh, you know,And and so that was one really clever
way of just drawing me into theproduct. But at the core of what
I think we do as humans,what we're taught to do, is to
(07:25):
create fomo and to create fear andthen certain d in doubt and use what
I would call extrinsic motivation to danglecarrots and sticks and false deadlines to give
concessions and discounts to our customers toget them to convert instead of diving deep
with them and treating them like theywant to be treated where they want to
(07:46):
feel competent and they want to beyou have a sense of relatedness and have
a sense of autonomy and that decisionand it's our job to dive deep with
them and support it and create moments, like Chris Boss says, which are
those that's right moment, and bethose advisors and consultants where we can present
(08:07):
ideas about differentiated credit solutions, butthey can glom onto and say that's right,
let's go explore that together and thentie that to some sort of initiative.
And so that's what I'm trying tooperationalize and train my team on and
kind of build out in a productexperience and the full funnel. And it
can be difficult, but there areways to do it. Man so much
(08:30):
good stuff in their first a Shamelesspromotional plug. We are also huge fans
of Jaco vander Koy winning by Designthe bow Tie Funnel. Jacko is featured
in chapter three of the book thatI co authored with my friends Steve,
called Human Centered Communication. Anyone canget it. It's a Wall Street Journal
bestseller. You can get it absolutelyfree at bombomb dot com slash freebook.
(08:50):
It's bombomb dot com slash freebook tocelebrate its one year anniversary. We enhance
the digital version ourselves internally and madeit totally free. So I want to
get into this idea of how youare aligning, Pete, because I am
one hundred percent with you on thisidea of if we want long term success
(09:11):
and long term relationships, if weare to earn the privilege to deliver recurring
impact and earn recurring revenue, itis going to be in this scenario where
we are legit helping people do somethingbetter, faster, get a better outcome,
be more efficient, whatever the casemay be. And so these kind
of carrots and sticks, the falseurgency, maybe even some exaggerated claims,
(09:35):
all of that stuff. Like Ifeel like we're past it. Like I
think we can tell ourselves that it'sworking by the way now by just basically
restating, like the first page ofJacko's chapter of the book, what looks
like it's working. We're like,it's working, it's working. Ultimately,
I don't think we have the visionto acknowledge what isn't working about it.
And I think for our long termbenefit operating in this way and organizing our
(09:58):
teams and training our teams the wayyou describe, that's why I want to
get into it is the way.But before we go too far forward,
just for context for folks, justgive me a quick go at friend By,
Like who are your ideal customers andwhat are some of the problems that
you're solving for them? Yeah,so a friend By powers loyalty and referral
(10:18):
programs for high growth D two Cand B to B brands. We're expanding
into B to B traditionally. We'vebeen in business for eleven years and we've
power referral programs for the past sixyears, we've developed a loyalty solution for
online first direct to consumer e commercebrands. Our ideal customer is a brand
(10:39):
that's growing, that has a lotof monthly unique site visitors, that wants
to either acquire new customers at alower CPA cost p acquisition, grow that
customer base and get them to repeatpurchase and retain them through differentiated solutions,
and really think about their segmentation.Running campaigns that will create that flywheel essentially
(11:00):
and create surprise and delight moments whereyou can reward a customer for pausing a
subscription or I have some clever storiesthat I think really aligned with a customer
experience that I'll tell a little bitlater. So that's who we serve and
and so I've been really obsessing moreover the D two C space, even
though i'm B to B SaaS,but what we want as humans and so
(11:20):
when I think about consumers, whetheryou're you're B to B, you're selling
to a CFO or a marketing department, or whether you're a consumer on a
shopping like on an e commerce store, there's this fear of messing up.
There's this when Jacol calls um Ithink he tells Fomo in his new book
Jolt Effect. And on a consumerperspective, it's like like buyer's remorse.
(11:45):
I bought this, Oh you know, did I use cognitive dissonance? I
regret that purchase. I shouldn't havepurchased in this emotional moment. But in
the B to B space we havethat as well. So it's our job
to really guide our customers to feelempowered to make that purchase and feel good
about it according to their needs.And a lot of it has to do
(12:07):
with giving back and helping them synthesizetheir problem statements, and that can be
really difficult. So I can getinto that as well. Okay, so
many directions I want to go here. First, A just a really practical
question, VP revenue. Do youoversee marketing sales and CS or is it
primarily marketing sales? Like what isyour purview when you talk about like training
(12:30):
your team and aligning your team specificallyaround GTM, which is really interesting based
on what you just shared there,there's a lot of nuanced and complexity in
it. I feel like, butwhat is your scope of for lack of
a more human term ownership over theseresponsibilities. Yeah, I mean customer success
is a newer termans ass, it'snot that old. And the revenue a
(12:52):
job function is a newerterman s assas well, it's not that old.
I manage a sales development team anda sales development leader and a team and
then informally the marketing team, thepartner marketing team and are onboarding and CS
team. I'll probably take that oververy soon. I'm three months and eighteen
(13:13):
days into my new job, soI'm really focusing on pre sales new business,
but I'm still doing a lot oftraining and operationalizing of the onboarding,
the activation and the CS function,the support, the retention, the renewals,
as well as the go to marketstrategy and the alignment between marketing and
sales. So I'm doing all themodeling top down revenue modeling and the forecasting
(13:39):
across the entire funnel and ORG.So eventually I'll encapsulate marketing, pre sales,
post sales across that bowtime funnel.Really good, just to add to
your list of language that's relatively new, I think GTM is just kind of
blown up over the last two orthree years. I think a lot of
people confuse it as marketing strategy.It's obviously a lot more from your perspective
(14:01):
when you say GTM or go tomarket beyond what you just shared, Is
there anything else you'd like to addto that, because I think you just
kind of captured it all, likeit's this team sport alignment, shared mission
and understanding end to end of what'sgoing on. But kind of anything else
you want to add to the conceptof GTM from your perspective or experience.
(14:22):
Yeah, I think go to market. Like I believe you just mentioned this,
go to market strategy typically falls onthe marketing function, positioning ideal customer
profile, building the buyer personas,the positioning and messaging in the Jocko just
posted about this, I think thismorning he said, Hey, SaaS companies
(14:46):
are taken a hit, but SASis working and recurring revenue models are working.
What's failing is go to market strategy. And I didn't read the whole
post. What I believe he's alludingto is the alignment across the entire bow
tie funnel, across the entire organd creating this revenue is a team sport
mindset. How do we inspire andmake sure that everybody understands what the okayrs,
(15:11):
what the heck they mean, whatthese SaaS acronyms mean, what those
formulas are, and how the individualcontributors, all the way down to the
individual contributors will move the needle throughday to day through day to day work.
How do we inspire them to findtheir own purpose tied to those north
Star objectives and align around that andobsess over the customers so that customer,
(15:33):
the voice of the customer permeates throughoutthe org and then aligne on that go
to market strategy, the launching andthe sequencing of that strategy, to coordinate
messaging and the way we interact withour customers throughout their entire journey. And
that's really difficult. We have allthese different job functions that are many times
siloed. So how do we alignmarketing and sales and CS and onboarding and
(15:56):
product It's a tough thing to do. Yeah, really is. I've been
at this podcast for over four yearsnow, and what you've just stated is
essentially the kind of the m Oor even the thesis of the show is
that experience is our best differentiator.It's not really the product differentiation and service
differentiation is even harder than aligning people, I think these days, because anyone
(16:18):
can rip us off, knock usoff, steal our language at a new
feature or function in a matter ofhours, if not a matter of months
at the latest. So if experiencesour best differentiator, and even in a
healthy culture, marketing, sales andcs can get a bit siloed, the
consequences that customers experience something disjointed,so they're not left with that resounding,
(16:42):
clear impression of this is what it'sabout. I feel like I belong here,
I like what I'm getting out ofit, and all these other things
that we want people to think andfeel and say and act against loyalty and
referral. So you're speaking exactly tothe mo of how and why this started
and why it persists. And that'swhy I'm so excited to have you on.
(17:03):
So one of the things that yousaid, and I've heard it in
other words before, but you wereso adamant about it, is this concept
of team sport revenue as a teamsport. You've already spoken to it already
here, like in the first fifteenminutes of this conversation a couple of different
ways, but that language seemed veryclear and very direct from you. I'd
(17:25):
love for you to state why thatlanguage is so powerful and speak to the
team part, speak to the sportpart. Is sport just comfortable language that
everyone's familiar with, or does thatword even have some intention for you?
Yeah, I was an athlete.I didn't coin that term. I've learned
it in a pavilion session or something. I've heard it from somebody else.
I would love to give them credit, but I've heard that a few places.
(17:48):
What's really odd also about SaaS isin most orgs, the sales team
is the only team that has somesort of variable component to their salary.
So many instances that I've seen itcreates this finger pointing scenario where it's all
on sales, but sales isn't.There are a lot of dependencies across the
(18:10):
entire orger. We've talked about marketingand sequencing and positioning and the voice of
the customer permeating throughout the ORB.And so when I say team sport,
everybody has to row the boat inthe same direction. Everybody has to believe
and in the mission and exuded.Everybody has to believe in themselves and feel
empowered and find their purpose to theirnorth star objectives for the company, so
(18:33):
they can interact with customers in avery similar way. And so when I
think about revenues a team sport,we have a one of the first things
I did hear at friend Bibs tocreate a Slack channel to celebrate wins,
to celebrate losses, and to giveshout outs across the org of the folks
involved, even behind the scenes thatweren't maybe in a customer facing role that
(18:56):
impacted a conversion or even might needto be brought in about a loss for
some reason, because those are equallyimportant, and so shoutouts and recognition and
acknowledgement are a big part of revenuesa team sport. Our go to market
strategy is through the partner channel.We have platform partners, which are the
(19:18):
shopping carts that shopifies the world salesforcecommerce cloud. We have ecosystem partners where
we have the SMS and email providersthat are building subscriber lists. We have
the subscription providers. We have allthese people that we piggyback off of that
we rely on and so it's alsothe ecosystem and who develops that. It's
the product team, it's the integrationsteam, it's the partner marketing team who
(19:40):
comes in pre sales to support theaccount executives. It's sometimes we're bringing the
director of CSM. Sometimes we bringin our head of onboarding and a solutions
engineer, And it really does takea village to close a deal. And
I believe the best team's map internalstake to external, not only to support
(20:02):
a customer to show, not tell, but also because everybody hears things differently,
we need different perspectives. What didyou hear, Ethan? What did
you hear? Adam? What doyou hear? TJ? And that call,
and let's really support them and finda differentiated solution. I think acknowledgement
and mapping and it is just reallycritical on that team sport and so that's
what I believe in so good.It reminds me of a conversation I had
(20:26):
with a gentleman named Justin Zaluski onthe show where we talked a bit about
customer journey is fine, but reallythis what you've mentioned about internal and external.
We talked a bit about service blueprintsof like what actually has to happen
internally to support that journey, becauseit's often an overlooked element. I want
to double back into this idea ofindividual purpose aligned with company purpose, maybe
(20:49):
around the word mission, because Ifeel like there are two factors, and
you can correct me if you seeit differently, but I feel like there
are two factors that you've introduced herethat helped create this alignment, because you're
right, it does take a village. We all do need to row in
the same direction. A deal isnot one by one superhero salesperson alone,
(21:11):
and I don't think any on asalesperson would say otherwise, at least in
a relatively complex environment or a complexsale. We do rely on other people,
and I feel like one of themis the mission and purpose of the
company, and then how do wekind of tie into that? And I
think the other one is probably authenticvoice of the customer. What do they
really need, what do they reallywant? How are they really motivated?
(21:32):
How can we teach people internally whatthat means. You also introduce partner,
which is another interesting factor, butstart with that mission piece, like,
is that something that you know isthat founders or exact team exploring and rearticulating
mission. Was the mission like clearwhen you were being recruited or interviewing into
(21:52):
friend by, like what was thestate of the mission or like how did
the mission develop there? So thatwhen you're in one on ones with your
team members you can have part ofthe conversation dedicated to you know, what
is your personal purpose or mission?How does that tie to what we're doing,
so that we can all kind ofrow in this direction. Like tighten
that up just a little bit forme. Yeah, the mission wasn't clearly
(22:15):
defined. Our values aren't clearly defined. We don't display them on our website,
and that happens with many companies.We're a bootstrap company where we're fifty
people, but we've been in businessfor eleven years and we're very successful.
And that's I think that's really rareand sass. And so the first month
I interviewed a lot of people acrossthe company. They just had conversations really
like tell me why you're here,tell me why you love your job,
(22:37):
tell me what you don't like aboutyour job. What do you think your
purpose is here? How are youmoving the needle for the org? And
I think it's our job as leadershipto really feel that feedback and say,
this is what our people, ournumber one asset, are telling us.
And I believe we can differentiate ourbrand through the way we interact with our
(23:00):
customers aside from product differentiation and plansand feature gating and stuff like that.
I believe companies can do that.I believe it's my job and leadership's job
to synthesize that and get that feedbackand really self reflect and say, this
is what we've heard from you andwhy you've been spending your last four years.
(23:22):
Here are two years or six months, and this is what our mission
is from you. This is whatwe've heard from customers, and we're going
to combine those and create this.And then it's our job to help distill
what that mission is based on thatthe aggregate feedback from customers and also our
people really good speak a little bittoo, voice of customer and how that's
(23:45):
alive in for you. I'm surethere are various input channels. There's I
heard you talk a little bit aboutkind of win loss celebrating those into black
channels. What are some of theother touch points to hear and share in
a line around voice of customer,like, what are some of the other
inputs, I mean, surveys,actual conversations, employees feeding it back in
(24:07):
in some manner, Like I thinkit's a thing that every company wants to
be better at, So anything you'vegot to share will be helpful. Yeah.
No, I think the only wayto know why we have picklists and
Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever you use, and we all have our own biases,
and sometimes we have the fear ofmessing up, so we pick something
from a picklist that we think weheard, but we don't know why we
(24:29):
lost a deal unless we talk tothe customer. And there are ways I
think to approach a customer says,hey, we have the pleasure of speaking
to marketers. As a marketer,I believe you could empathize with me that
I'd love to hear from you bluntly. Bluntly, I don't need the sandwich,
the shit sandwich. Maybe you canedit that out, but the shit
(24:49):
sandwich of a compliment, and thensome constructive criticism a compliment, I want
the constructive criticism where we went wrongand how we could have done better.
That's the only way to And soI'm also constantly just trying to interview customers
about why we lost or why wewon. And the way that I think
we can disseminate that through throughout theORG. Whether you use medic or spice
(25:12):
or bant or med pick, whateverframework you use, is to present why
you want or why you lost ina very structural way. And so if
you want to, you know,for Jaco's Spice and Winning by Design,
I've been through his training, whatwas the situation, what was their qualitative
and quantitative paino, what was theimpact, what was the critical event?
(25:33):
You could go through that to reallysynthesize it. A person I admire very
much online is Nate Nazzarella. Heasked his customers very difficult questions, like,
Ethan, you're in the buying committee. If you were to describe your
problem statement to me or to yourteammate in a one and one in a
conference room by ourselves, in onesentence, what would it be. That's
(25:55):
a very difficult question. It's likeasking me, what are your tenants or
value? Most people haven't thought aboutthat. I can distill them now for
you because I have a post ithere that reminds me. But if you
can communicate across the org in aSlack channel to the product team, to
the marketing team, to the CSteam, to the onboarding team about the
components of the deal, who youdealt with and why friend by, why
(26:17):
now? Why bomb? Bomb?Why now? What was it about the
deal? And then give that acknowledgementin a very structured way. It gives
people a heck of a lot ofcontext. And they're also really great tools,
you know, with AI and transcriptionnow where you can search the real
transcriptions to get the voice of thecustomer and distill that down and stack rank
(26:37):
you know, different or common objectionsand common reasons why you've lost in one.
But I think it starts with usdisseminate that in a very structured way
so that everybody can take action onit and understand the context of a deal
one or lost love it, AndI love that you're directly involved in getting
into those win loss especially. Ithink you mentioned the lost side of it,
(27:00):
and I think that's where all thelearning is and I think it's one
of those things that I just wantto take a minute to get your perspective
on this. I'm just going toshare an opinion. I think you know
we're several months from now into thisgenerative AI zone where it's more accessible.
It's being baked into more products,more things are popping up every day.
We all have a lot more directaccess to experiment and learn with it.
(27:22):
And my caution in casual conversation sofar has been be careful what you outsourced
to the machine versus what you keepyour hands on yourself. And when I
think about you, Adam being involvedin win loss conversations, I think that's
critical. I think the idea ofrelying on a transcript exclusively to create that
(27:47):
understanding and to share that understanding missis two critical components. One is what
wasn't said that's not in the transcript, and the other one is how something
was said. But you, asa human being who's thoughtful and interested in
actively listening, can discern both ofthose very much, and that will drive
you to maybe ask a good followup question based on how something was said,
(28:10):
or based on something you expected tohear but didn't. In the response,
speak a little bit to how youare thinking about what jobs should I
make sure that my people keep doingand what might we search for tech solutions
around I know that's kind of abig vague question, but anything that I
triggered there. I'd love to getyour perspective on that. Yes, transcriptions
are maybe twenty percent of the realstory, you know, generative AI.
(28:36):
You know I can search all myhistorical transcriptions or the tool we use and
say, great stack rank the topten objections for e commerce brands that you
shopify and this ecosystem tool and it'llspit it out. And that's great for
maybe product ROMap planning, but it'snot a substitute for picking up the phone
and getting on a call with acustomer that is frustrated with you and agree.
(29:00):
We all have them. I justhad one yesterday, and being okay
with difficult conversations and listening and acknowledgingthat you're frustrated with me, and I
want to do it's right for you, whether you decide to churn or not
go with us or continue our relationshipand partnership. Those conversations are critical to
the success of the org. Pickingup the phone and having those, hopefully
(29:21):
on his Zoo call so you canlook somebody in the eye and read their
body language and say, hey,I'm sensing frustration. You curled up there?
Can you dive deeper with me?And be honest and open because I
just want to get better again.Whether you decide to turn or go with
me or not, that's not what'simportant to me. It's talking to you
and listening to you, and that'sreally critical, and I think that supplements
(29:44):
the transcriptions and what AI can doto stack rank the top ten objections or
reasons why somebody turned out. Thesecond part of your question was what systems
can I use to kind of enhancethat experience? Is that what your question
was? Yeah, it wasn't reallyeven direct. It is just kind of
a wide open like you know,how how are you? And you already
did a great job of it.I love your use case example off the
(30:06):
top is hey, go to thesethings, give me the top ten based
on a couple of specific criteria.I also love the number that you threw
out of that's twenty percent of thepicture, whether it's twenty or whether it's
thirty, or whether it's seventeen orwhether it's thirty eight. Directionally, I
agree with you completely somewhat related well, I think we need to be okay
(30:27):
with having difficult conversations, and yeah, those are okay are I would say
some of the most productive conversations.I like friends. I'm a person that
loves community. We built a gatebetween our neighbor's yard within the first month,
and I come home and my neighbor'schildren are in my refrigerator again in
this our cream. And that's okay. We have an open door policy.
(30:48):
But I don't want a friend.I want somebody who's going to be a
critical and forth right and invested inthe relationship. And we're taught to be
our customers friend and eventually, yeah, I'd love to be their friend.
But I want somebody who's going tobe invested in critical. And that's why
my favorite buyer persona is the skeptic. They dive deep, they ask you
(31:11):
the difficult questions. That's part ofwhat Nate Nasralla's kind of m is is
that question around if you're a Londonroom with your manager, your teammate talking
about your problem, statement, describeit to me in one sentence. That
is a difficult question. It's onethat we need to get to in order
to know that we're working on theright thing. So we can be a
good partner, we can be agood teammate, we can be a good
(31:33):
vendor. So that's why I thinkit starts. I think most of the
suffering in the human condition. Iknow, I just went wide there.
It is related to an unwillingness tohave difficult conversations. People don't like to
start them, and people don't liketo be involved in them on average.
But I completely agree with you,And I'm wondering if there's anything that you've
(31:53):
done, whether it's at friend Byand the team that you have today or
whether historically throughout your career, whatare some of the ways that you coach
people to set the table or setthe scene so that people feel comfortable,
and people feel confident, and peoplefeel secure to share the thing that they're
(32:14):
thinking or feeling. That so oftenwe have to try to discern from the
word choice the way that they contortedand expressing those words in that way,
and so we know what they're tryingto say, but they're not saying,
Like, how do you think aboutcoaching or motivating or encouraging people to set
the scene or to create an environmentwhere people are willing just to say what
(32:35):
they need to say instead of dancearound it a little bit or avoid it
altogether. Yeah, So my weeklyone and one should be a safe space
between somebody who reports to me andme. I really want them to set
the agenda. It's their time.I don't want to go through pipeline.
I'm happy to talk about deals ifthat's what they want to talk about,
but I do want to create coachingmoments and show them that they're supported and
(32:58):
part of might technique, which ispart of my own insecurity that I have.
I'm a human. It's like,I don't know what I want to
be when I grow up. I'mforty six. I've selected this career.
It happens to be traditionally very stressfuland pressure relating career. I feed off
that, but it also does createstress in my personal life, and I
have to mitigate that in a waythat's healthy for me and my partner and
(33:22):
my daughter. So what I tryto do is dispel any insecurity and anxiety,
say this is your time. Youget to make the agenda. I'm
here to support you and whatever youwant. I have some reps that are
just totally motivated by money and theyjust want to talk about deals and that's
what they want, and the majorityof them, what I found is I
(33:44):
don't know what I want to bewhen I grow up. What's my path?
I might and I'll have a pathfor them. I'm a fifty I'm
part of a fifty person company.I don't have the luxury of having all
these open job wrecks. But mycommitment to my team is that I will
invest in them and help pad themor help connect them to either one on
(34:05):
one mentorship with me, or somebodyacross the org in a different time zone
to be inclusive about different time zonesand different backgrounds so they can explore different
career paths, or somebody in mynetwork, and following through with allowing people
to explore different functions, different skills. Just having conversations and facilitating that is
(34:28):
really critical. And if somebody wantsto learn Excel and how to do a
v lookup, we're nestitive statements.Or if they want to learn Python or
whatever. Many people don't know whereto start. What are the best business
books you've read? Great? Hereare five, And then they don't take
action on it. So I'll justbuy them the book. I'll do a
(34:49):
weekly book club if they want,and I'll read the book with them and
we'll discuss it. I'll connect themto somebody in my network who has that
skill set, but I probably don'thave. And I take that first step
and then we try to track onthat, and it's up to them to
be able to say, hey,I want to pull the parachute, pull
the ripcord, and bow out ofthis thing. Let's to go onto the
next thing. I have some peoplethat I go deeper into, where I
(35:10):
have this like four column exercise.What's your personal identity, what's your professional
identity, what is your identity andyour current role and what identity do you
want to be? What's your idealstate? And what's a slog and what
makes you feel fulfilled? And whereis the overlap in those columns? So
I have different frameworks and techniques Ican use with different people to show them
(35:32):
that I'm invest in them and Icare about them, and I will pad
them wherever the heck they want togo, and to openly communicate that I
may not have a role for them, but I will support them as long
as they reciprocate and they're invested inme and invest in the role right now,
whether they leave the company or wherethey stay. And I feel like
if you can communicate that and createthat safe space, they're going to be
(35:54):
so much more productive and the roleand feel so much more fulfilled. They'll
be loyal as long as they wantto be loyal, And it's not my
job to retain them or own them, but it's to invest in them and
build my own community. And Iget a lot of fulfilment out of that.
And that seems to work pretty wellfor me. Well, like I
(36:14):
can own it in my authentic voice, and it seems to reston it.
Yeah. I think just sorry steppedon the end there, because that's exactly
right. I mean, it's sotrue to you and that sincerity, that
sincere interest in other people and yourwillingness to come alongside them and like,
as a book club of two,we're going to read this together. Like
(36:34):
that can't be faked. That doesn'tscale. I think there's something inherently valuable
about that idea. And I think, just kind of going back to the
beginning, I think the behavior thatyou're modeling there, what you're creating for
them, is something that comes throughin their customer interactions, where they are
now invested in and aligned with theirprospect or their customer in a way.
(36:59):
I just feel like you're setting aculture, in setting a stage where the
customer experience is a natural outgrowth ofthe employee experience. This idea that people
do feel connected, that people dofeel supported, that people do feel like
someone adjacent to them actually cares,And that kind of brings me to this
(37:19):
theme of effectiveness versus efficiency. Ithink everyone wants and we do. We
need things that are more predictable thannot. We need things that are more
repeatable than not. We do needto drive results through process. But I
feel like there's a constant tension,and I think when there's trouble, people
are biased too much one way orthe other. There is no repeatability,
(37:39):
there is no consistency, there isno process, or we've over mechanized and
over automated the whole thing. Talkabout like you strike me as a very
thoughtful and balanced person. I'm sureyou've dealt with this tension repeatedly in a
variety of environments. I'd love anythoughts or recommendations you have on finding the
(38:00):
middle path between those two tensions.Yeah, so when you talk about scalability,
you know, as friend by grows, I might have frontline managers who
have six to eight people under them, and I hope to impart my mantra
and then but let them own itin their own authentic way. That could
be scalable for book club and stufflike that, but they need a coach
(38:20):
in their own way. When Ithink about coaching, it's like it's inspiring,
it's investing in the humans. It'sit's inspecting the process. And when
I have to create processes for predictability, to trust conversion rates in the funnel
and be able to model and getdown to unit economics and calculate our sas
efficiency metrics, I do have tomechanize things and sometimes I create blockers.
(38:44):
My last manager, who is theCEO of Cultura, Adep Moskovich, she
taught me that I'm a very passionateperson. I have a lot of expertise.
Sometimes that can come across as abrasive. So it's really to start off
with to lead with what's in itfor you, Here's why I'm doing this,
and to explain it. It's likewe create OKRs and many of them
(39:05):
are sas efficiency metrics, CAC paybackand then PS. Many people don't understand
what those mean or how they're they'recalculated. So over explaining that and then
explaining what's in it for them andhow they can impact that. So when
I create exit and entrance criteria andsalesforce where reps can't trick the system and
skip a stage in a sales processfrom stage one to stage three, so
(39:27):
I can trust those the drop offsin the acceleration. They can see that
as oh Man Adams, you know, asking me to enter in more data,
other or more criteria before I moveon to the next stage. I
stay out of my pipeline. ButI really do have to over explain why
I'm doing it, why it matters, and how they can impact this thing
and what's in it for them.But still those one on ones or in
(39:52):
a team setting to create a safespace for them to say, this is
really a slog, but I needto hold them accountable. It's easy to
complain, it's easy to call outthings that aren't working, but I need
a cretic culture where people are comingup with solutions. Great, what's not
working on? Why? How doesthe data support it? What are your
suggestions for solutions? Let's go experimentthat together. Are you in because that
(40:15):
was your idea. I'm totally gameto do that, and that's easier to
do it at earlier stage where themachine isn't super super well oiled, and
that's kind of my biased experience comingup with early stage startups, but I
really enjoy that. So yeah,it's leading with what's in it for you,
explaining how they can impact, andthen allowing them to have a seat
(40:36):
at the table and holding them accountablelike you'd hold a customer accountable, to
synthesizing their problem statement so you cancome to a solution together really good and
it kind of doubles back into yourobservations and insights around the willingness to have
hard, honest conversations when necessary.I think it's another reason that accountability sometimes
flames out is that it's anchored inthis Sometimes it's hard to do and so
(41:00):
people avoid it or they taped answer, they kind of mask it a little
bit. I so appreciate your modelingthe culture and supporting and motivating the culture.
I think that's key. It remindsme something. I know. This
essentially been the Jaco vander Koi fanclub a little bit off and on,
(41:21):
but I'm also in that I'm alsoin that club. It reminds me of
the first time that I ever sawand present it was at a I think
it was an outreach event several yearsago, and the core idea there was
scaling failure versus scaling success. Andso in these zones, before we step
on the gas, before we doublethe team, before we do some of
(41:44):
these things, it's so important forso much of the groundwork to be in
place, and it's really in everythingthat you've been sharing with us in this
conversation at them, but specifically theculture. Of course it's all based in
unit economics as well. The numbersall need to be there and it needs
to make sense, like you wantto pour gas on something that isn't showing
the right early unit economics. Butthe groundwork in this and the idea of
(42:07):
including people in it again, doingsome of the unscalable work is so critical
to success. What's ahead for youand the team at Friendby just generally you
can take them where if you wantto go. Yeah, do you mind
if I tell you two stories?Can we stay a little bit? Please?
Please? Do? Okay? They'reone story I have that was super
impactful my career just happened last year. We read all the data from outreach
(42:30):
and sales loft and how you shouldwrite a sequence or a cadence when you're
outbounding more bottom of funnel messaging ormental funnel or top of funnel messaging.
And we're taught to, you know, the five paragraph essay. You have
a thesis, you build up toyour conclusion, then you say your conclusion.
Well, you know you have toflip that around and just say what
you mean or write what you wantto, write what you mean. And
(42:52):
part of that is coming through isassertiveness and tenacity and removing all the niceties.
And I wrote a sequence for acampaign we were launching last year at
Cultura, and we had launched itand I had one of my reps come
up to me. She came upto me privately in a one to one
(43:13):
and said, Adam, I seewhat you're doing. I know why you're
doing it. This is what outreachand sales loft and all the data tells
you you should be doing as asales leader and what I should be doing.
But I'm a woman and I'm perceivedin a different ways you and this
tone isn't my tone. You've talkedabout me writing in my own authentic voice,
(43:36):
and she was concerned that I wouldn'tallow her to tweak the tone of
the message. So that she wouldfeel comfortable presenting her own authentic voice in
the outreach as a woman because ofthe way that she's perceived in the world.
And I was like, holy crap, I don't even know how to
respond to that. The first thingI did was like, absolutely, can
(43:59):
you please help teach me more aboutthat. I talked to my wife.
I still don't know how to respondto that because I'm a male and I'm
kind of brown, but in thesummer, I'm a little more and I'm
like a white male in the SaaSand there's we're a dime a dozen.
So I need that feedback loop,whether it's from a customer, whether it's
from a teammate, and creating thatsafe space is critical to my own evolution,
(44:22):
to my success. So I cansupport my team and allow their authentic
voices to come through, because somebody'sgoing to buy from her that would never
buy from me or buy from you, and she's going to be able to
support her customers in a different waythat I never would be able to.
And one more story is that Iwas talking to my friend Monique Roberts.
She's a tech speaker, she's thehead of B two C audacity. And
(44:44):
she used to own her own cakebusiness for seventeen years. And this is
before small business CRMs and marketing automation. And she said, the first thing
I would do is I would pickup the phone of the customer. I'd
say, cool, what kind ofhave been are you throwing? And they
said, oh, I want toa pancake? They said cool, how
big? I want a big one? And I want a layered cake,
you know, stacked cake. Andshe's just she said, great, how
(45:06):
many people are gonna be at theevent? Ten? She said, I'm
not gonna make you that cake.You don't need that cake, and they'd
inevitably go, you know, andthere'd be shock. She just said,
here's what I'm gonna make you.I'm gonna make you this smaller cake.
It's going to be as elegant asyou want. I'm gonna take in your
esthetic. I only want to makeyou a cake that you're going to be
able to consume. So there's nota bunch of extra stale, crumbly cake
(45:30):
left over, but you're going tobe able to consume it. Maybe how
you can give people a couple piecesof cake, and when they bought it,
there was a little bit of ashock, but she had a ninety
percent repeat purchase rate, and shewould dive deeper and she would log things
in her notebook, like had pinkhair, went to Spain and the person
that had pink hair, the nextweek, she'd send him a pink cupcake
(45:52):
for free. And she would askpeople to reciprocate and hold them accountable,
to say, please send me pictures, and on her wall. Over the
years, she had a storyline likewe would have in our CRM of the
continuity that customer throughout the years andall of the events with their cakes,
whether it was the free cupcakes shegave them or the pancake. It's just
(46:14):
really impactful to hear these stories aboutholding the customer accountable, giving them what
they want, but diving deep withthem and then showing them that you care
through continuity. And the only wayyou can get that is through having conversations
with your customers, not analyzing transcriptsof AI. So I went off topic
there, but I wanted to tellyou this two stories because that's where my
(46:36):
brand's been in the past a coupleof weeks in the past year. I
love it. It gives me twomore topics for our next conversation, whether
we record it for this show ornot. One of them is this idea
in its nuance, and I don'teven mean to get into the identity piece
of it. I think there's afundamental truth even underneath being a white male
in SaaS versus being someone else inSaaS. What you said around she will
(47:00):
sell to someone who probably who maynot buy from you or may not buy
from me. There's a lot there. I think that's a super interesting conversation
because again it speaks to this ideaof people buying from people, but not
in a cliche way. It's likewho do I connect with? Who do
I feel confident about? Who doI align with and identify who aligns with
(47:21):
me? These kinds of things.And then this other like the rate of
repeat purchasing in the cake story,and the idea that there is the visualization
of something that we already know that'shappening, but the fact that we can
make it an experience to demonstrate howmuch of our lives we've been through with
this customer. You also introduce theidea of challenging customers and holding them accountable.
(47:45):
I think that's a topic that wehave not spent enough time on.
It comes up periodically on the show, but I think it's something that we're
currently you know, it's kind ofa background conversation where I am, and
it's something that we haven't done historically. Well, so we'll need to do
that another time. For folks whohave enjoyed this conversation with Adam, we've
mentioned two people in particular. Oneof them, of course, is Jacko
(48:07):
vander Koy. He was our gueston episode two twenty one, which is
actually a re rack of a previousepisode that we did, is Steve and
I, who we co authored HumanCentered Communication. We interviewed all eleven of
the experts who are represented in thatbook. Jocko kicks off that set of
chapters in chapter three but episode twotwenty one with Jacko vander Koy creating customer
(48:28):
impact in moments that matter. Andthen we also talked a little bit about
customer and decision or actually you did, Adam, I just listened, but
customer and decision in the book theJolt Effects. So I hosted Matt Dixon
on episode two thirty seven. Wecalled that one keys to Overcoming Customer and
Decision. A lot of really interestingresearch there. It's all essentially human psychology
(48:51):
and functionally evolutionary psychology, but specificallythe way that it manifests in the buying
process and losing out to the biggestcompetitor of all which no decision. So
this episode two twenty one with Jacko, Episode two thirty seven with Matt before
I let you go, Adam first, thank you so much. This has
been a joy. But I wouldlove for you to do a couple of
things for us. The first isto think or mentioned someone who's had a
(49:13):
positive impact on your life or career. And the second is to give an
out or a shout out to accompanyor brand that you personally appreciate for the
experience they deliver for you as acustomer. I mentioned a d she said,
lead with what's in it for you? I mentioned Nate Astrella, had
the pleasure of meeting him a coupleof times, mainly follow his content.
Really respected. He really teaches peoplethat operationalize intrinsic motivation and emotion and holding
(49:37):
customers accountable in your sales cycle,which is really impressive. Brad King,
my old CERO. He taught methat I'm a passionate person, but sometimes
that can be perceived as being combativeand defensive, but to harness that passion
and not be too emotionally involved butand too assumptive or judgmental, but to
(49:58):
own my passion and kind of harnessthat. The next one is Aaron Derondo.
We've built two teams together. He'shelped me accountable to creating values and
tenants and has really taught me alot about stress mitigation and making decisions based
on my values and tenants so itcan be to find clarity in those decisions.
(50:19):
Those are people that I really respect, brands that I really respect.
Tom Shoes. I mean, I'mnot really a fan of their shoes,
but the concept that they created ofbuy one, give one is to create
community and give back really resonates withme. I feel like I try to
do that in my sales leadership.And then somebody locally, my friend JANNETCHIVERI
(50:42):
she's owned a Cuban restaurant in SanJose, California for nineteen years. She's
an outlier. She during the weekendsvolunteers in a local community called Paharo or
the levy broke and flooded the entiretown. Nobody's watching her. She's serving
a thousand meals a day, drivingback and forth three hours and waking up
at four am to do that.In addition to running her business, she
(51:06):
coaches four different soccer teams co edwomen's, men's only goes to tournaments.
Is a great, very altruistic person, and she's a community builder. I
love brands that build a community,and she embodies that. That's beautiful.
Gosh, we need to know howshe manages that lifestyle. I think that
(51:27):
requires an insane amount not only tobe motivated the right way and to be
a giver by default, but like, where do you find the time and
energy? I don't know. Mywife and I are always wondering. Yeah,
she's like a pit bull. She'slike always on. You know.
She's just a wonderful person. That'samazing. Thank you so much for that.
If folks want to connect with you, I assume LinkedIn is a good
(51:49):
spot. But where else would yousend people to learn more about you or
about friend? By that? Youcan text me, I won't pick up.
I'm a sales leader, but Iget cold called all day. Text
me at four one five, nine, four eight seven three three two reach
out on LinkedIn my email at friendbuys a Ferris Farris at friendby dot com.
I make myself available. I reallyenjoy setting up one and once from
(52:12):
my LinkedIn community and making those connections, and that keeps me fulfilled. So
let me know what can help.Wonderful. Thank you so much. You're
awesome. I appreciate your approach.I'm just really glad that you were able
to share all of this with us. I appreciate the time as well.
We're pushing about an hour almost andagain with those three or four other topics
that emerged that I would like topursue. Will have to do that another
(52:36):
time. Adam. Appreciate you.I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks Sathan,
it was a pleasure. A marketingfuturist from Salesforce, the first salesperson
at HubSpot, an emotional intelligence expertwith seven US patents in the analysis of
facial coding data. These are justthree of more than a dozen experts featured
in the Wall Street Journal bestseller HumanCentered Community, A Business Case against Digital
(53:01):
Pollution. The purpose of the bookto give you frameworks, strategies, and
specific tactics to create human connection acrossthe digital divide. Learn to break through
the noise, build trust, andenhance your reputation and revenue despite the ever
increasing digital noise and pollution that separatesus all. Get your copy of Human
(53:24):
Centered Communication absolutely free at bombomb dotcom slash freebook. That's bomb bomb dot
com slash free book. Thanks forlistening to the Customer Experience Podcast. Remember
the single most important thing you cando today is to create and deliver a
(53:45):
better experience for your customers. Continuelearning the latest strategies and tactics by subscribing
right now in your favorite podcast player, or visit bombomb dot com slash podcasts
The single most important thing you cando today is to create and deliver a
better experience for your customers. Learnhow sales, marketing and customer success experts
create internal alignment, achieved desired outcomes, and exceed customer expectations in a personal
and human way. This is theCustomer Experience Podcast. Here's your host,
(00:24):
Ethan Butte. Revenue is a teamsport that's the philosophical and practical approach of
today's guest. He's an advisor,investor, mentor, and board member for
several companies. He built his careeras a sales leader at companies like Caltura,
DUTA, and Sorcery Technologies. Todayhe serves as VP of Revenue at
friend By, a referral and loyaltyprogram for direct to consumer and B to
(00:49):
B brands. Among the places Ihope to go maybe a little overambitious,
but aligning around go to market strategy, understanding our customers and their intrinsic motivations
in the middle way between efficiency andeffectiveness, and serving both D two C
and B to B brands. Withthat, Adam Ferris, Welcome to the
Customer Experience Podcast. Thank you Ethan. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be
(01:11):
here. Thanks for having me.Yeah, I don't know if we'll get
to cover all that ground, butI hope too, because I know you
have a lot of helpful ideas aboutall of them. But we'll start where
we always do, which is customerexperience. When I say that, what
does it mean to you? Adam? Yeah, that's a loaded question for
me. I got my MBA intwo thousand and five, before marketing automation
existed. You know, I wastaught that customer experience means everything your ORG
(01:34):
does to obsess over the customer,manage their journeys and serve their needs.
And while I agree with that philosophically, I agree with most of that,
it doesn't encapsulate for me the nuancesbetween B two C and B to B
from my biased perspective as a goto market revenue leader, and nor is
(01:56):
it really actionable from an OPS standpointand how you execute on that throughout the
buyer journey across your org, inyour mission, etc. And I believe
that the you know, at thefundamental core of who we are as humans
were emotional beings and we expect,you know, what do we want as
(02:17):
humans? We expect our interactions tobe personal and continuous. And I use
this term equal parts debit and credit. And that's what I want out of
my relationships with my partner, mywife, my friends, my family,
my neighbors, my teammates, mycustomers. And that's what our customers want,
(02:38):
you know, whether you're D twoC or B to B. And
so what I believe CX starts withis it really starts with you as a
person and the sales cycle. Itstarts with your brand and really obsessing over
who you are as a brand,what you stand for, and how you
execute on that mission, and howyou empower your team to find their purpose
(03:02):
through that mission so they can exudethat mission and interact with customers throughout their
journey, you know, in avery human and emotional and personal way.
And so I believe it doesn't startwith a customer first. It really takes
a lot of self reflection in orderto create a better customer experience to be
(03:22):
able to execute what I what Ijust mentioned, what kind of person do
you want to be? What kindof brand do you want to be?
And then how do you apply thatand not personalize it? So much good
stuff in there, and it isfar more practical than I think some people
might give credit to. I thinksome people when they hear words like mission
or exude, I think some ofthe more hardcore people would say, that's
(03:44):
not that's that's actually far more actionablethan a lot of other approaches. And
I really appreciate above all your insideout approach to this, Who am I,
who are we? Who are weas a brand in a company?
What motivates us from a mission perspective, and then how does that manifest in
the experience that we have. WhatI'm going to infer also from what you
(04:05):
said and kind of turn it backto you for your thoughts or response to
it, is that a lot ofthe experience is driven by human to human
interaction. I think a lot ofthe emotional resonance and the impression, some
of the brand impression, or someof the experiential takeaways really are to I
(04:26):
mean to use the word humans oremotional creatures talk about the importance of human
to human moments even in some ofthese more product led motions that aren't as
maybe direct and interactive. But Istill think that even in scenarios where the
human to human moments aren't necessarily builtin to be core part of the process,
(04:48):
perhaps as they are for friend buying, as they are for bomb bomb.
You know, most people wind uptalking to a team member of ours
before they make their decision about howbest to proceed. I think those human
to human moments, as frequent orinfrequent, as intentional or unintentional as they
might be, probably leave greater emotionalresonance and therefore greater impact on the perceived
(05:10):
experience. Yeah, there's a lotto impact there. I'll get to the
PLG emotion in a bit. I'vebeen in B to B SaaS for about
eleven years and to go to marketposition, and we put up these friction
points, and I think about thefunnel as Jaco from Winning by Design thinks
about it, the bow tie funnel. And we have awareness building and education.
(05:31):
Whether we educate our customers, theyself educate, then you convert them
and then they there's time there's adoptionor activation. There's time to first impact
or time to value, and thenthere's recurring impact. And if you think
about those, you know, tosimpivide six different stages in the bow tie
funnel. We put up these naturalfriction points that with these different job functions,
(05:55):
the SDR the AE and some sortof support system, then the onboarding
team, then it may be theCS team, and then the renewal's team,
and there's a lot of touch pointsthere, and it's really difficult to
create continuity for customers. They customerswant don't want to have to retell their
story, retell their problem statement,talk about their milestones and goals and rehash
(06:18):
that at every stage, or beinterrogated at every stage, or feel like
they're being interrogated. And so howdo you create continuity for a customer when
we've created all these job functions andB to B SaaS And that's really really
difficult, and a lot of thatcan be solved with systems and handoff processes
and stuff like that. Then wecan talk about PLG and the product.
(06:40):
You know, our product has alot of work, you know for a
PLG motion. When I go intoa product, I don't know what to
do, you know, I don'tknow what the first step that my product
wants me to take is or whatI should be doing, and how I
get guided through through the product andexperience surprise and delight. For example,
rip just I just got paid Ithink last week on Sinco de Mayo and
(07:04):
Rippling had this, you know,a JavaScript animated JavaScript element that was a
pinata dunking piniata that was giving mecandy, and that was that was I
made me laugh, you know,And and so that was one really clever
way of just drawing me into theproduct. But at the core of what
I think we do as humans,what we're taught to do, is to
(07:25):
create fomo and to create fear andthen certain d in doubt and use what
I would call extrinsic motivation to danglecarrots and sticks and false deadlines to give
concessions and discounts to our customers toget them to convert instead of diving deep
with them and treating them like theywant to be treated where they want to
(07:46):
feel competent and they want to beyou have a sense of relatedness and have
a sense of autonomy and that decisionand it's our job to dive deep with
them and support it and create moments, like Chris Boss says, which are
those that's right moment, and bethose advisors and consultants where we can present
(08:07):
ideas about differentiated credit solutions, butthey can glom onto and say that's right,
let's go explore that together and thentie that to some sort of initiative.
And so that's what I'm trying tooperationalize and train my team on and
kind of build out in a productexperience and the full funnel. And it
can be difficult, but there areways to do it. Man so much
(08:30):
good stuff in their first a Shamelesspromotional plug. We are also huge fans
of Jaco vander Koy winning by Designthe bow Tie Funnel. Jacko is featured
in chapter three of the book thatI co authored with my friends Steve,
called Human Centered Communication. Anyone canget it. It's a Wall Street Journal
bestseller. You can get it absolutelyfree at bombomb dot com slash freebook.
(08:50):
It's bombomb dot com slash freebook tocelebrate its one year anniversary. We enhance
the digital version ourselves internally and madeit totally free. So I want to
get into this idea of how youare aligning, Pete, because I am
one hundred percent with you on thisidea of if we want long term success
(09:11):
and long term relationships, if weare to earn the privilege to deliver recurring
impact and earn recurring revenue, itis going to be in this scenario where
we are legit helping people do somethingbetter, faster, get a better outcome,
be more efficient, whatever the casemay be. And so these kind
of carrots and sticks, the falseurgency, maybe even some exaggerated claims,
(09:35):
all of that stuff. Like Ifeel like we're past it. Like I
think we can tell ourselves that it'sworking by the way now by just basically
restating, like the first page ofJacko's chapter of the book, what looks
like it's working. We're like,it's working, it's working. Ultimately,
I don't think we have the visionto acknowledge what isn't working about it.
And I think for our long termbenefit operating in this way and organizing our
(09:58):
teams and training our teams the wayyou describe, that's why I want to
get into it is the way.But before we go too far forward,
just for context for folks, justgive me a quick go at friend By,
Like who are your ideal customers andwhat are some of the problems that
you're solving for them? Yeah,so a friend By powers loyalty and referral
(10:18):
programs for high growth D two Cand B to B brands. We're expanding
into B to B traditionally. We'vebeen in business for eleven years and we've
power referral programs for the past sixyears, we've developed a loyalty solution for
online first direct to consumer e commercebrands. Our ideal customer is a brand
(10:39):
that's growing, that has a lotof monthly unique site visitors, that wants
to either acquire new customers at alower CPA cost p acquisition, grow that
customer base and get them to repeatpurchase and retain them through differentiated solutions,
and really think about their segmentation.Running campaigns that will create that flywheel essentially
(11:00):
and create surprise and delight moments whereyou can reward a customer for pausing a
subscription or I have some clever storiesthat I think really aligned with a customer
experience that I'll tell a little bitlater. So that's who we serve and
and so I've been really obsessing moreover the D two C space, even
though i'm B to B SaaS,but what we want as humans and so
(11:20):
when I think about consumers, whetheryou're you're B to B, you're selling
to a CFO or a marketing department, or whether you're a consumer on a
shopping like on an e commerce store, there's this fear of messing up.
There's this when Jacol calls um Ithink he tells Fomo in his new book
Jolt Effect. And on a consumerperspective, it's like like buyer's remorse.
(11:45):
I bought this, Oh you know, did I use cognitive dissonance? I
regret that purchase. I shouldn't havepurchased in this emotional moment. But in
the B to B space we havethat as well. So it's our job
to really guide our customers to feelempowered to make that purchase and feel good
about it according to their needs.And a lot of it has to do
(12:07):
with giving back and helping them synthesizetheir problem statements, and that can be
really difficult. So I can getinto that as well. Okay, so
many directions I want to go here. First, A just a really practical
question, VP revenue. Do youoversee marketing sales and CS or is it
primarily marketing sales? Like what isyour purview when you talk about like training
(12:30):
your team and aligning your team specificallyaround GTM, which is really interesting based
on what you just shared there,there's a lot of nuanced and complexity in
it. I feel like, butwhat is your scope of for lack of
a more human term ownership over theseresponsibilities. Yeah, I mean customer success
is a newer termans ass, it'snot that old. And the revenue a
(12:52):
job function is a newerterman s assas well, it's not that old.
I manage a sales development team anda sales development leader and a team and
then informally the marketing team, thepartner marketing team and are onboarding and CS
team. I'll probably take that oververy soon. I'm three months and eighteen
(13:13):
days into my new job, soI'm really focusing on pre sales new business,
but I'm still doing a lot oftraining and operationalizing of the onboarding,
the activation and the CS function,the support, the retention, the renewals,
as well as the go to marketstrategy and the alignment between marketing and
sales. So I'm doing all themodeling top down revenue modeling and the forecasting
(13:39):
across the entire funnel and ORG.So eventually I'll encapsulate marketing, pre sales,
post sales across that bowtime funnel.Really good, just to add to
your list of language that's relatively new, I think GTM is just kind of
blown up over the last two orthree years. I think a lot of
people confuse it as marketing strategy.It's obviously a lot more from your perspective
(14:01):
when you say GTM or go tomarket beyond what you just shared, Is
there anything else you'd like to addto that, because I think you just
kind of captured it all, likeit's this team sport alignment, shared mission
and understanding end to end of what'sgoing on. But kind of anything else
you want to add to the conceptof GTM from your perspective or experience.
(14:22):
Yeah, I think go to market. Like I believe you just mentioned this,
go to market strategy typically falls onthe marketing function, positioning ideal customer
profile, building the buyer personas,the positioning and messaging in the Jocko just
posted about this, I think thismorning he said, Hey, SaaS companies
(14:46):
are taken a hit, but SASis working and recurring revenue models are working.
What's failing is go to market strategy. And I didn't read the whole
post. What I believe he's alludingto is the alignment across the entire bow
tie funnel, across the entire organd creating this revenue is a team sport
mindset. How do we inspire andmake sure that everybody understands what the okayrs,
(15:11):
what the heck they mean, whatthese SaaS acronyms mean, what those
formulas are, and how the individualcontributors, all the way down to the
individual contributors will move the needle throughday to day through day to day work.
How do we inspire them to findtheir own purpose tied to those north
Star objectives and align around that andobsess over the customers so that customer,
(15:33):
the voice of the customer permeates throughoutthe org and then aligne on that go
to market strategy, the launching andthe sequencing of that strategy, to coordinate
messaging and the way we interact withour customers throughout their entire journey. And
that's really difficult. We have allthese different job functions that are many times
siloed. So how do we alignmarketing and sales and CS and onboarding and
(15:56):
product It's a tough thing to do. Yeah, really is. I've been
at this podcast for over four yearsnow, and what you've just stated is
essentially the kind of the m Oor even the thesis of the show is
that experience is our best differentiator.It's not really the product differentiation and service
differentiation is even harder than aligning people, I think these days, because anyone
(16:18):
can rip us off, knock usoff, steal our language at a new
feature or function in a matter ofhours, if not a matter of months
at the latest. So if experiencesour best differentiator, and even in a
healthy culture, marketing, sales andcs can get a bit siloed, the
consequences that customers experience something disjointed,so they're not left with that resounding,
(16:42):
clear impression of this is what it'sabout. I feel like I belong here,
I like what I'm getting out ofit, and all these other things
that we want people to think andfeel and say and act against loyalty and
referral. So you're speaking exactly tothe mo of how and why this started
and why it persists. And that'swhy I'm so excited to have you on.
(17:03):
So one of the things that yousaid, and I've heard it in
other words before, but you wereso adamant about it, is this concept
of team sport revenue as a teamsport. You've already spoken to it already
here, like in the first fifteenminutes of this conversation a couple of different
ways, but that language seemed veryclear and very direct from you. I'd
(17:25):
love for you to state why thatlanguage is so powerful and speak to the
team part, speak to the sportpart. Is sport just comfortable language that
everyone's familiar with, or does thatword even have some intention for you?
Yeah, I was an athlete.I didn't coin that term. I've learned
it in a pavilion session or something. I've heard it from somebody else.
I would love to give them credit, but I've heard that a few places.
(17:48):
What's really odd also about SaaS isin most orgs, the sales team
is the only team that has somesort of variable component to their salary.
So many instances that I've seen itcreates this finger pointing scenario where it's all
on sales, but sales isn't.There are a lot of dependencies across the
(18:10):
entire orger. We've talked about marketingand sequencing and positioning and the voice of
the customer permeating throughout the ORB.And so when I say team sport,
everybody has to row the boat inthe same direction. Everybody has to believe
and in the mission and exuded.Everybody has to believe in themselves and feel
empowered and find their purpose to theirnorth star objectives for the company, so
(18:33):
they can interact with customers in avery similar way. And so when I
think about revenues a team sport,we have a one of the first things
I did hear at friend Bibs tocreate a Slack channel to celebrate wins,
to celebrate losses, and to giveshout outs across the org of the folks
involved, even behind the scenes thatweren't maybe in a customer facing role that
(18:56):
impacted a conversion or even might needto be brought in about a loss for
some reason, because those are equallyimportant, and so shoutouts and recognition and
acknowledgement are a big part of revenuesa team sport. Our go to market
strategy is through the partner channel.We have platform partners, which are the
(19:18):
shopping carts that shopifies the world salesforcecommerce cloud. We have ecosystem partners where
we have the SMS and email providersthat are building subscriber lists. We have
the subscription providers. We have allthese people that we piggyback off of that
we rely on and so it's alsothe ecosystem and who develops that. It's
the product team, it's the integrationsteam, it's the partner marketing team who
(19:40):
comes in pre sales to support theaccount executives. It's sometimes we're bringing the
director of CSM. Sometimes we bringin our head of onboarding and a solutions
engineer, And it really does takea village to close a deal. And
I believe the best team's map internalstake to external, not only to support
(20:02):
a customer to show, not tell, but also because everybody hears things differently,
we need different perspectives. What didyou hear, Ethan? What did
you hear? Adam? What doyou hear? TJ? And that call,
and let's really support them and finda differentiated solution. I think acknowledgement
and mapping and it is just reallycritical on that team sport and so that's
what I believe in so good.It reminds me of a conversation I had
(20:26):
with a gentleman named Justin Zaluski onthe show where we talked a bit about
customer journey is fine, but reallythis what you've mentioned about internal and external.
We talked a bit about service blueprintsof like what actually has to happen
internally to support that journey, becauseit's often an overlooked element. I want
to double back into this idea ofindividual purpose aligned with company purpose, maybe
(20:49):
around the word mission, because Ifeel like there are two factors, and
you can correct me if you seeit differently, but I feel like there
are two factors that you've introduced herethat helped create this alignment, because you're
right, it does take a village. We all do need to row in
the same direction. A deal isnot one by one superhero salesperson alone,
(21:11):
and I don't think any on asalesperson would say otherwise, at least in
a relatively complex environment or a complexsale. We do rely on other people,
and I feel like one of themis the mission and purpose of the
company, and then how do wekind of tie into that? And I
think the other one is probably authenticvoice of the customer. What do they
really need, what do they reallywant? How are they really motivated?
(21:32):
How can we teach people internally whatthat means. You also introduce partner,
which is another interesting factor, butstart with that mission piece, like,
is that something that you know isthat founders or exact team exploring and rearticulating
mission. Was the mission like clearwhen you were being recruited or interviewing into
(21:52):
friend by, like what was thestate of the mission or like how did
the mission develop there? So thatwhen you're in one on ones with your
team members you can have part ofthe conversation dedicated to you know, what
is your personal purpose or mission?How does that tie to what we're doing,
so that we can all kind ofrow in this direction. Like tighten
that up just a little bit forme. Yeah, the mission wasn't clearly
(22:15):
defined. Our values aren't clearly defined. We don't display them on our website,
and that happens with many companies.We're a bootstrap company where we're fifty
people, but we've been in businessfor eleven years and we're very successful.
And that's I think that's really rareand sass. And so the first month
I interviewed a lot of people acrossthe company. They just had conversations really
like tell me why you're here,tell me why you love your job,
(22:37):
tell me what you don't like aboutyour job. What do you think your
purpose is here? How are youmoving the needle for the org? And
I think it's our job as leadershipto really feel that feedback and say,
this is what our people, ournumber one asset, are telling us.
And I believe we can differentiate ourbrand through the way we interact with our
(23:00):
customers aside from product differentiation and plansand feature gating and stuff like that.
I believe companies can do that.I believe it's my job and leadership's job
to synthesize that and get that feedbackand really self reflect and say, this
is what we've heard from you andwhy you've been spending your last four years.
(23:22):
Here are two years or six months, and this is what our mission
is from you. This is whatwe've heard from customers, and we're going
to combine those and create this.And then it's our job to help distill
what that mission is based on thatthe aggregate feedback from customers and also our
people really good speak a little bittoo, voice of customer and how that's
(23:45):
alive in for you. I'm surethere are various input channels. There's I
heard you talk a little bit aboutkind of win loss celebrating those into black
channels. What are some of theother touch points to hear and share in
a line around voice of customer,like, what are some of the other
inputs, I mean, surveys,actual conversations, employees feeding it back in
(24:07):
in some manner, Like I thinkit's a thing that every company wants to
be better at, So anything you'vegot to share will be helpful. Yeah.
No, I think the only wayto know why we have picklists and
Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever you use, and we all have our own biases,
and sometimes we have the fear ofmessing up, so we pick something
from a picklist that we think weheard, but we don't know why we
(24:29):
lost a deal unless we talk tothe customer. And there are ways I
think to approach a customer says,hey, we have the pleasure of speaking
to marketers. As a marketer,I believe you could empathize with me that
I'd love to hear from you bluntly. Bluntly, I don't need the sandwich,
the shit sandwich. Maybe you canedit that out, but the shit
(24:49):
sandwich of a compliment, and thensome constructive criticism a compliment, I want
the constructive criticism where we went wrongand how we could have done better.
That's the only way to And soI'm also constantly just trying to interview customers
about why we lost or why wewon. And the way that I think
we can disseminate that through throughout theORG. Whether you use medic or spice
(25:12):
or bant or med pick, whateverframework you use, is to present why
you want or why you lost ina very structural way. And so if
you want to, you know,for Jaco's Spice and Winning by Design,
I've been through his training, whatwas the situation, what was their qualitative
and quantitative paino, what was theimpact, what was the critical event?
(25:33):
You could go through that to reallysynthesize it. A person I admire very
much online is Nate Nazzarella. Heasked his customers very difficult questions, like,
Ethan, you're in the buying committee. If you were to describe your
problem statement to me or to yourteammate in a one and one in a
conference room by ourselves, in onesentence, what would it be. That's
(25:55):
a very difficult question. It's likeasking me, what are your tenants or
value? Most people haven't thought aboutthat. I can distill them now for
you because I have a post ithere that reminds me. But if you
can communicate across the org in aSlack channel to the product team, to
the marketing team, to the CSteam, to the onboarding team about the
components of the deal, who youdealt with and why friend by, why
(26:17):
now? Why bomb? Bomb?Why now? What was it about the
deal? And then give that acknowledgementin a very structured way. It gives
people a heck of a lot ofcontext. And they're also really great tools,
you know, with AI and transcriptionnow where you can search the real
transcriptions to get the voice of thecustomer and distill that down and stack rank
(26:37):
you know, different or common objectionsand common reasons why you've lost in one.
But I think it starts with usdisseminate that in a very structured way
so that everybody can take action onit and understand the context of a deal
one or lost love it, AndI love that you're directly involved in getting
into those win loss especially. Ithink you mentioned the lost side of it,
(27:00):
and I think that's where all thelearning is and I think it's one
of those things that I just wantto take a minute to get your perspective
on this. I'm just going toshare an opinion. I think you know
we're several months from now into thisgenerative AI zone where it's more accessible.
It's being baked into more products,more things are popping up every day.
We all have a lot more directaccess to experiment and learn with it.
(27:22):
And my caution in casual conversation sofar has been be careful what you outsourced
to the machine versus what you keepyour hands on yourself. And when I
think about you, Adam being involvedin win loss conversations, I think that's
critical. I think the idea ofrelying on a transcript exclusively to create that
(27:47):
understanding and to share that understanding missis two critical components. One is what
wasn't said that's not in the transcript, and the other one is how something
was said. But you, asa human being who's thoughtful and interested in
actively listening, can discern both ofthose very much, and that will drive
you to maybe ask a good followup question based on how something was said,
(28:10):
or based on something you expected tohear but didn't. In the response,
speak a little bit to how youare thinking about what jobs should I
make sure that my people keep doingand what might we search for tech solutions
around I know that's kind of abig vague question, but anything that I
triggered there. I'd love to getyour perspective on that. Yes, transcriptions
are maybe twenty percent of the realstory, you know, generative AI.
(28:36):
You know I can search all myhistorical transcriptions or the tool we use and
say, great stack rank the topten objections for e commerce brands that you
shopify and this ecosystem tool and it'llspit it out. And that's great for
maybe product ROMap planning, but it'snot a substitute for picking up the phone
and getting on a call with acustomer that is frustrated with you and agree.
(29:00):
We all have them. I justhad one yesterday, and being okay
with difficult conversations and listening and acknowledgingthat you're frustrated with me, and I
want to do it's right for you, whether you decide to churn or not
go with us or continue our relationshipand partnership. Those conversations are critical to
the success of the org. Pickingup the phone and having those, hopefully
(29:21):
on his Zoo call so you canlook somebody in the eye and read their
body language and say, hey,I'm sensing frustration. You curled up there?
Can you dive deeper with me?And be honest and open because I
just want to get better again.Whether you decide to turn or go with
me or not, that's not what'simportant to me. It's talking to you
and listening to you, and that'sreally critical, and I think that supplements
(29:44):
the transcriptions and what AI can doto stack rank the top ten objections or
reasons why somebody turned out. Thesecond part of your question was what systems
can I use to kind of enhancethat experience? Is that what your question
was? Yeah, it wasn't reallyeven direct. It is just kind of
a wide open like you know,how how are you? And you already
did a great job of it.I love your use case example off the
(30:06):
top is hey, go to thesethings, give me the top ten based
on a couple of specific criteria.I also love the number that you threw
out of that's twenty percent of thepicture, whether it's twenty or whether it's
thirty, or whether it's seventeen orwhether it's thirty eight. Directionally, I
agree with you completely somewhat related well, I think we need to be okay
(30:27):
with having difficult conversations, and yeah, those are okay are I would say
some of the most productive conversations.I like friends. I'm a person that
loves community. We built a gatebetween our neighbor's yard within the first month,
and I come home and my neighbor'schildren are in my refrigerator again in
this our cream. And that's okay. We have an open door policy.
(30:48):
But I don't want a friend.I want somebody who's going to be a
critical and forth right and invested inthe relationship. And we're taught to be
our customers friend and eventually, yeah, I'd love to be their friend.
But I want somebody who's going tobe invested in critical. And that's why
my favorite buyer persona is the skeptic. They dive deep, they ask you
(31:11):
the difficult questions. That's part ofwhat Nate Nasralla's kind of m is is
that question around if you're a Londonroom with your manager, your teammate talking
about your problem, statement, describeit to me in one sentence. That
is a difficult question. It's onethat we need to get to in order
to know that we're working on theright thing. So we can be a
good partner, we can be agood teammate, we can be a good
(31:33):
vendor. So that's why I thinkit starts. I think most of the
suffering in the human condition. Iknow, I just went wide there.
It is related to an unwillingness tohave difficult conversations. People don't like to
start them, and people don't liketo be involved in them on average.
But I completely agree with you,And I'm wondering if there's anything that you've
(31:53):
done, whether it's at friend Byand the team that you have today or
whether historically throughout your career, whatare some of the ways that you coach
people to set the table or setthe scene so that people feel comfortable,
and people feel confident, and peoplefeel secure to share the thing that they're
(32:14):
thinking or feeling. That so oftenwe have to try to discern from the
word choice the way that they contortedand expressing those words in that way,
and so we know what they're tryingto say, but they're not saying,
Like, how do you think aboutcoaching or motivating or encouraging people to set
the scene or to create an environmentwhere people are willing just to say what
(32:35):
they need to say instead of dancearound it a little bit or avoid it
altogether. Yeah, So my weeklyone and one should be a safe space
between somebody who reports to me andme. I really want them to set
the agenda. It's their time.I don't want to go through pipeline.
I'm happy to talk about deals ifthat's what they want to talk about,
but I do want to create coachingmoments and show them that they're supported and
(32:58):
part of might technique, which ispart of my own insecurity that I have.
I'm a human. It's like,I don't know what I want to
be when I grow up. I'mforty six. I've selected this career.
It happens to be traditionally very stressfuland pressure relating career. I feed off
that, but it also does createstress in my personal life, and I
have to mitigate that in a waythat's healthy for me and my partner and
(33:22):
my daughter. So what I tryto do is dispel any insecurity and anxiety,
say this is your time. Youget to make the agenda. I'm
here to support you and whatever youwant. I have some reps that are
just totally motivated by money and theyjust want to talk about deals and that's
what they want, and the majorityof them, what I found is I
(33:44):
don't know what I want to bewhen I grow up. What's my path?
I might and I'll have a pathfor them. I'm a fifty I'm
part of a fifty person company.I don't have the luxury of having all
these open job wrecks. But mycommitment to my team is that I will
invest in them and help pad themor help connect them to either one on
(34:05):
one mentorship with me, or somebodyacross the org in a different time zone
to be inclusive about different time zonesand different backgrounds so they can explore different
career paths, or somebody in mynetwork, and following through with allowing people
to explore different functions, different skills. Just having conversations and facilitating that is
(34:28):
really critical. And if somebody wantsto learn Excel and how to do a
v lookup, we're nestitive statements.Or if they want to learn Python or
whatever. Many people don't know whereto start. What are the best business
books you've read? Great? Hereare five, And then they don't take
action on it. So I'll justbuy them the book. I'll do a
(34:49):
weekly book club if they want,and I'll read the book with them and
we'll discuss it. I'll connect themto somebody in my network who has that
skill set, but I probably don'thave. And I take that first step
and then we try to track onthat, and it's up to them to
be able to say, hey,I want to pull the parachute, pull
the ripcord, and bow out ofthis thing. Let's to go onto the
next thing. I have some peoplethat I go deeper into, where I
(35:10):
have this like four column exercise.What's your personal identity, what's your professional
identity, what is your identity andyour current role and what identity do you
want to be? What's your idealstate? And what's a slog and what
makes you feel fulfilled? And whereis the overlap in those columns? So
I have different frameworks and techniques Ican use with different people to show them
(35:32):
that I'm invest in them and Icare about them, and I will pad
them wherever the heck they want togo, and to openly communicate that I
may not have a role for them, but I will support them as long
as they reciprocate and they're invested inme and invest in the role right now,
whether they leave the company or wherethey stay. And I feel like
if you can communicate that and createthat safe space, they're going to be
(35:54):
so much more productive and the roleand feel so much more fulfilled. They'll
be loyal as long as they wantto be loyal, And it's not my
job to retain them or own them, but it's to invest in them and
build my own community. And Iget a lot of fulfilment out of that.
And that seems to work pretty wellfor me. Well, like I
(36:14):
can own it in my authentic voice, and it seems to reston it.
Yeah. I think just sorry steppedon the end there, because that's exactly
right. I mean, it's sotrue to you and that sincerity, that
sincere interest in other people and yourwillingness to come alongside them and like,
as a book club of two,we're going to read this together. Like
(36:34):
that can't be faked. That doesn'tscale. I think there's something inherently valuable
about that idea. And I think, just kind of going back to the
beginning, I think the behavior thatyou're modeling there, what you're creating for
them, is something that comes throughin their customer interactions, where they are
now invested in and aligned with theirprospect or their customer in a way.
(36:59):
I just feel like you're setting aculture, in setting a stage where the
customer experience is a natural outgrowth ofthe employee experience. This idea that people
do feel connected, that people dofeel supported, that people do feel like
someone adjacent to them actually cares,And that kind of brings me to this
(37:19):
theme of effectiveness versus efficiency. Ithink everyone wants and we do. We
need things that are more predictable thannot. We need things that are more
repeatable than not. We do needto drive results through process. But I
feel like there's a constant tension,and I think when there's trouble, people
are biased too much one way orthe other. There is no repeatability,
(37:39):
there is no consistency, there isno process, or we've over mechanized and
over automated the whole thing. Talkabout like you strike me as a very
thoughtful and balanced person. I'm sureyou've dealt with this tension repeatedly in a
variety of environments. I'd love anythoughts or recommendations you have on finding the
(38:00):
middle path between those two tensions.Yeah, so when you talk about scalability,
you know, as friend by grows, I might have frontline managers who
have six to eight people under them, and I hope to impart my mantra
and then but let them own itin their own authentic way. That could
be scalable for book club and stufflike that, but they need a coach
(38:20):
in their own way. When Ithink about coaching, it's like it's inspiring,
it's investing in the humans. It'sit's inspecting the process. And when
I have to create processes for predictability, to trust conversion rates in the funnel
and be able to model and getdown to unit economics and calculate our sas
efficiency metrics, I do have tomechanize things and sometimes I create blockers.
(38:44):
My last manager, who is theCEO of Cultura, Adep Moskovich, she
taught me that I'm a very passionateperson. I have a lot of expertise.
Sometimes that can come across as abrasive. So it's really to start off
with to lead with what's in itfor you, Here's why I'm doing this,
and to explain it. It's likewe create OKRs and many of them
(39:05):
are sas efficiency metrics, CAC paybackand then PS. Many people don't understand
what those mean or how they're they'recalculated. So over explaining that and then
explaining what's in it for them andhow they can impact that. So when
I create exit and entrance criteria andsalesforce where reps can't trick the system and
skip a stage in a sales processfrom stage one to stage three, so
(39:27):
I can trust those the drop offsin the acceleration. They can see that
as oh Man Adams, you know, asking me to enter in more data,
other or more criteria before I moveon to the next stage. I
stay out of my pipeline. ButI really do have to over explain why
I'm doing it, why it matters, and how they can impact this thing
and what's in it for them.But still those one on ones or in
(39:52):
a team setting to create a safespace for them to say, this is
really a slog, but I needto hold them accountable. It's easy to
complain, it's easy to call outthings that aren't working, but I need
a cretic culture where people are comingup with solutions. Great, what's not
working on? Why? How doesthe data support it? What are your
suggestions for solutions? Let's go experimentthat together. Are you in because that
(40:15):
was your idea. I'm totally gameto do that, and that's easier to
do it at earlier stage where themachine isn't super super well oiled, and
that's kind of my biased experience comingup with early stage startups, but I
really enjoy that. So yeah,it's leading with what's in it for you,
explaining how they can impact, andthen allowing them to have a seat
(40:36):
at the table and holding them accountablelike you'd hold a customer accountable, to
synthesizing their problem statement so you cancome to a solution together really good and
it kind of doubles back into yourobservations and insights around the willingness to have
hard, honest conversations when necessary.I think it's another reason that accountability sometimes
flames out is that it's anchored inthis Sometimes it's hard to do and so
(41:00):
people avoid it or they taped answer, they kind of mask it a little
bit. I so appreciate your modelingthe culture and supporting and motivating the culture.
I think that's key. It remindsme something. I know. This
essentially been the Jaco vander Koi fanclub a little bit off and on,
(41:21):
but I'm also in that I'm alsoin that club. It reminds me of
the first time that I ever sawand present it was at a I think
it was an outreach event several yearsago, and the core idea there was
scaling failure versus scaling success. Andso in these zones, before we step
on the gas, before we doublethe team, before we do some of
(41:44):
these things, it's so important forso much of the groundwork to be in
place, and it's really in everythingthat you've been sharing with us in this
conversation at them, but specifically theculture. Of course it's all based in
unit economics as well. The numbersall need to be there and it needs
to make sense, like you wantto pour gas on something that isn't showing
the right early unit economics. Butthe groundwork in this and the idea of
(42:07):
including people in it again, doingsome of the unscalable work is so critical
to success. What's ahead for youand the team at Friendby just generally you
can take them where if you wantto go. Yeah, do you mind
if I tell you two stories?Can we stay a little bit? Please?
Please? Do? Okay? They'reone story I have that was super
impactful my career just happened last year. We read all the data from outreach
(42:30):
and sales loft and how you shouldwrite a sequence or a cadence when you're
outbounding more bottom of funnel messaging ormental funnel or top of funnel messaging.
And we're taught to, you know, the five paragraph essay. You have
a thesis, you build up toyour conclusion, then you say your conclusion.
Well, you know you have toflip that around and just say what
you mean or write what you wantto, write what you mean. And
(42:52):
part of that is coming through isassertiveness and tenacity and removing all the niceties.
And I wrote a sequence for acampaign we were launching last year at
Cultura, and we had launched itand I had one of my reps come
up to me. She came upto me privately in a one to one
(43:13):
and said, Adam, I seewhat you're doing. I know why you're
doing it. This is what outreachand sales loft and all the data tells
you you should be doing as asales leader and what I should be doing.
But I'm a woman and I'm perceivedin a different ways you and this
tone isn't my tone. You've talkedabout me writing in my own authentic voice,
(43:36):
and she was concerned that I wouldn'tallow her to tweak the tone of
the message. So that she wouldfeel comfortable presenting her own authentic voice in
the outreach as a woman because ofthe way that she's perceived in the world.
And I was like, holy crap, I don't even know how to
respond to that. The first thingI did was like, absolutely, can
(43:59):
you please help teach me more aboutthat. I talked to my wife.
I still don't know how to respondto that because I'm a male and I'm
kind of brown, but in thesummer, I'm a little more and I'm
like a white male in the SaaSand there's we're a dime a dozen.
So I need that feedback loop,whether it's from a customer, whether it's
from a teammate, and creating thatsafe space is critical to my own evolution,
(44:22):
to my success. So I cansupport my team and allow their authentic
voices to come through, because somebody'sgoing to buy from her that would never
buy from me or buy from you, and she's going to be able to
support her customers in a different waythat I never would be able to.
And one more story is that Iwas talking to my friend Monique Roberts.
She's a tech speaker, she's thehead of B two C audacity. And
(44:44):
she used to own her own cakebusiness for seventeen years. And this is
before small business CRMs and marketing automation. And she said, the first thing
I would do is I would pickup the phone of the customer. I'd
say, cool, what kind ofhave been are you throwing? And they
said, oh, I want toa pancake? They said cool, how
big? I want a big one? And I want a layered cake,
you know, stacked cake. Andshe's just she said, great, how
(45:06):
many people are gonna be at theevent? Ten? She said, I'm
not gonna make you that cake.You don't need that cake, and they'd
inevitably go, you know, andthere'd be shock. She just said,
here's what I'm gonna make you.I'm gonna make you this smaller cake.
It's going to be as elegant asyou want. I'm gonna take in your
esthetic. I only want to makeyou a cake that you're going to be
able to consume. So there's nota bunch of extra stale, crumbly cake
(45:30):
left over, but you're going tobe able to consume it. Maybe how
you can give people a couple piecesof cake, and when they bought it,
there was a little bit of ashock, but she had a ninety
percent repeat purchase rate, and shewould dive deeper and she would log things
in her notebook, like had pinkhair, went to Spain and the person
that had pink hair, the nextweek, she'd send him a pink cupcake
(45:52):
for free. And she would askpeople to reciprocate and hold them accountable,
to say, please send me pictures, and on her wall. Over the
years, she had a storyline likewe would have in our CRM of the
continuity that customer throughout the years andall of the events with their cakes,
whether it was the free cupcakes shegave them or the pancake. It's just
(46:14):
really impactful to hear these stories aboutholding the customer accountable, giving them what
they want, but diving deep withthem and then showing them that you care
through continuity. And the only wayyou can get that is through having conversations
with your customers, not analyzing transcriptsof AI. So I went off topic
there, but I wanted to tellyou this two stories because that's where my
(46:36):
brand's been in the past a coupleof weeks in the past year. I
love it. It gives me twomore topics for our next conversation, whether
we record it for this show ornot. One of them is this idea
in its nuance, and I don'teven mean to get into the identity piece
of it. I think there's afundamental truth even underneath being a white male
in SaaS versus being someone else inSaaS. What you said around she will
(47:00):
sell to someone who probably who maynot buy from you or may not buy
from me. There's a lot there. I think that's a super interesting conversation
because again it speaks to this ideaof people buying from people, but not
in a cliche way. It's likewho do I connect with? Who do
I feel confident about? Who doI align with and identify who aligns with
(47:21):
me? These kinds of things.And then this other like the rate of
repeat purchasing in the cake story,and the idea that there is the visualization
of something that we already know that'shappening, but the fact that we can
make it an experience to demonstrate howmuch of our lives we've been through with
this customer. You also introduce theidea of challenging customers and holding them accountable.
(47:45):
I think that's a topic that wehave not spent enough time on.
It comes up periodically on the show, but I think it's something that we're
currently you know, it's kind ofa background conversation where I am, and
it's something that we haven't done historically. Well, so we'll need to do
that another time. For folks whohave enjoyed this conversation with Adam, we've
mentioned two people in particular. Oneof them, of course, is Jacko
(48:07):
vander Koy. He was our gueston episode two twenty one, which is
actually a re rack of a previousepisode that we did, is Steve and
I, who we co authored HumanCentered Communication. We interviewed all eleven of
the experts who are represented in thatbook. Jocko kicks off that set of
chapters in chapter three but episode twotwenty one with Jacko vander Koy creating customer
(48:28):
impact in moments that matter. Andthen we also talked a little bit about
customer and decision or actually you did, Adam, I just listened, but
customer and decision in the book theJolt Effects. So I hosted Matt Dixon
on episode two thirty seven. Wecalled that one keys to Overcoming Customer and
Decision. A lot of really interestingresearch there. It's all essentially human psychology
(48:51):
and functionally evolutionary psychology, but specificallythe way that it manifests in the buying
process and losing out to the biggestcompetitor of all which no decision. So
this episode two twenty one with Jacko, Episode two thirty seven with Matt before
I let you go, Adam first, thank you so much. This has
been a joy. But I wouldlove for you to do a couple of
things for us. The first isto think or mentioned someone who's had a
(49:13):
positive impact on your life or career. And the second is to give an
out or a shout out to accompanyor brand that you personally appreciate for the
experience they deliver for you as acustomer. I mentioned a d she said,
lead with what's in it for you? I mentioned Nate Astrella, had
the pleasure of meeting him a coupleof times, mainly follow his content.
Really respected. He really teaches peoplethat operationalize intrinsic motivation and emotion and holding
(49:37):
customers accountable in your sales cycle,which is really impressive. Brad King,
my old CERO. He taught methat I'm a passionate person, but sometimes
that can be perceived as being combativeand defensive, but to harness that passion
and not be too emotionally involved butand too assumptive or judgmental, but to
(49:58):
own my passion and kind of harnessthat. The next one is Aaron Derondo.
We've built two teams together. He'shelped me accountable to creating values and
tenants and has really taught me alot about stress mitigation and making decisions based
on my values and tenants so itcan be to find clarity in those decisions.
(50:19):
Those are people that I really respect, brands that I really respect.
Tom Shoes. I mean, I'mnot really a fan of their shoes,
but the concept that they created ofbuy one, give one is to create
community and give back really resonates withme. I feel like I try to
do that in my sales leadership.And then somebody locally, my friend JANNETCHIVERI
(50:42):
she's owned a Cuban restaurant in SanJose, California for nineteen years. She's
an outlier. She during the weekendsvolunteers in a local community called Paharo or
the levy broke and flooded the entiretown. Nobody's watching her. She's serving
a thousand meals a day, drivingback and forth three hours and waking up
at four am to do that.In addition to running her business, she
(51:06):
coaches four different soccer teams co edwomen's, men's only goes to tournaments.
Is a great, very altruistic person, and she's a community builder. I
love brands that build a community,and she embodies that. That's beautiful.
Gosh, we need to know howshe manages that lifestyle. I think that
(51:27):
requires an insane amount not only tobe motivated the right way and to be
a giver by default, but like, where do you find the time and
energy? I don't know. Mywife and I are always wondering. Yeah,
she's like a pit bull. She'slike always on. You know.
She's just a wonderful person. That'samazing. Thank you so much for that.
If folks want to connect with you, I assume LinkedIn is a good
(51:49):
spot. But where else would yousend people to learn more about you or
about friend? By that? Youcan text me, I won't pick up.
I'm a sales leader, but Iget cold called all day. Text
me at four one five, nine, four eight seven three three two reach
out on LinkedIn my email at friendbuys a Ferris Farris at friendby dot com.
I make myself available. I reallyenjoy setting up one and once from
(52:12):
my LinkedIn community and making those connections, and that keeps me fulfilled. So
let me know what can help.Wonderful. Thank you so much. You're
awesome. I appreciate your approach.I'm just really glad that you were able
to share all of this with us. I appreciate the time as well.
We're pushing about an hour almost andagain with those three or four other topics
that emerged that I would like topursue. Will have to do that another
(52:36):
time. Adam. Appreciate you.I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks Sathan,
it was a pleasure. A marketingfuturist from Salesforce, the first salesperson
at HubSpot, an emotional intelligence expertwith seven US patents in the analysis of
facial coding data. These are justthree of more than a dozen experts featured
in the Wall Street Journal bestseller HumanCentered Community, A Business Case against Digital
(53:01):
Pollution. The purpose of the bookto give you frameworks, strategies, and
specific tactics to create human connection acrossthe digital divide. Learn to break through
the noise, build trust, andenhance your reputation and revenue despite the ever
increasing digital noise and pollution that separatesus all. Get your copy of Human
(53:24):
Centered Communication absolutely free at bombomb dotcom slash freebook. That's bomb bomb dot
com slash free book. Thanks forlistening to the Customer Experience Podcast. Remember
the single most important thing you cando today is to create and deliver a
(53:45):
better experience for your customers. Continuelearning the latest strategies and tactics by subscribing
right now in your favorite podcast player, or visit bombomb dot com slash podcasts
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.