December 13, 2021 • 37 mins
In episode 109, host Eric Dickmann interviews Erik Newton. Erik currently serves as the Vice President of Milestone Inc., a digital marketing software and services company and has recently published a management and self-development book, called- “Hack the Corporate Fast Track.”
Milestone Internet Marketing Inc. aims to organize and amplify digital information to reach the right audience through digital media advertising, social media. SEO, and analytics.
Erik is a prolific writer with more than 175 blogs to his credit.
For more information and access to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit:
https://fiveechelon.com/specific-tactics-customer-obsessed-s7ep9/
A fractional CMO can help build out a comprehensive marketing strategy and execute targeted campaigns designed to increase awareness and generate demand for your business...without the expense of a full-time hire.
The Five Echelon Group - Fractional CMO and strategic marketing advisory services designed for SMBs looking to grow. Learn more at:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Eric Dickmann (00:02):
Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
In this podcast, we haveconversations with marketing
professionals who share thestrategies, tactics, and mindset
you can use to improve theeffectiveness of your marketing
activities and grow yourbusiness.
Erik, welcome to The Virtual CMOpodcast.
Very glad you could join ustoday.
Erik Newton (00:22):
Thanks! Glad to be here.
Eric Dickmann (00:25):
I love our topic today because we're going to
really talk about the customerand being obsessed.
And how do you know if you're anobsessed business about your
customer?
And you know, I don't want tolead things off here by being
overly pessimistic, but I thinkas a consumer, it's pretty much
assumed that most businesses arenot going to be very customer
obsessed that they're not goingto focus too much on me as a
customer.
(00:45):
What do you think is the stateof the customer today with most
businesses?
Erik Newton (00:50):
You know maybe like a lot of things, it's a standard
distribution of excellent toaverage, to poor.
So maybe there's 3% in thatfirst standard deviation and 13%
that are getting a B+ or better.
But I think the society isorganized into making money.
And now, you're a publiccompany, you're supposed to be
(01:11):
making profits, you're supposedto be making the stock go up.
So you get focused on money andmaybe you forget that the place
where the money comes from isthe customer.
So if you want to think aboutmoney and you want to be, you
know, profitable and successful,I think you can't go wrong being
customer obsessed.
Everything about the customer ishelpful for your business.
(01:32):
Everything you do, any kind ofservice provider, but
particularly if you're in asubscription business where
people are staying with youmonth to month or quarter to
quarter, you have to renew.
It's like being an employeethat's on a shorter contract,
right?
If your contract as an employeegot renewed every month, you
would really be focused on whatyou got to do this month to get
(01:53):
to the next month.
But I think people lose sight ofthat.
And I heard this term customerobsessed from Forrester, and it
helps because I work in SiliconValley.
You know our agency is a productand service company.
And when we go to talk to theanalyst, when we do briefings
and inquiries, They say, well,you know, prove to us that
(02:14):
you're customer obsessed.
Like you know, they're helpingus organize the communication
and the presentation lead withthe customer, lead with the
customer's problems.
It's more fun.
There's always a time and aplace to talk product or
solution, but it's usually notthe beginning.
It's usually sort of the middleof that process.
Eric Dickmann (02:32):
Yeah, I agree.
And I think you know being fromSilicon Valley, you certainly
are in the hub of technology.
And I think a lot oftechnologists are engineers at
heart, right?
They are looking at things froma product standpoint, not
necessarily from our customer'sstandpoint.
Give you a great example.
I just got a message the otherday from a provider.
I had a bill that I needed topay so they sent me a text
(02:53):
reminder.
I go to their website and theysay, well, please enter your
bill number.
Well, how the heck do I knowwhat my bill number is?
I'm responding a text message,you know?
But that's the way their systemis probably indexed to know what
to do, but it's completelyoutside the realm of what I, as
a customer have available at myfingertips.
just wonder.
Erik Newton (03:12):
Maybe they've gone backwards here.
At first, you might've beenhappy to get a reminder that
this bill is due and it's a goodtime to pay.
And now you feel like you gotgiven homework.
Which is the things I like tosay, don't give your boss
homework and don't give yourcustomers homework.
Make things easy, right?
Where my job as a marketer is tobe packaging things so that
they're ultra consumable andwe're maximizing that the
(03:36):
benefit and the esteem, and thevalue that that customer
perceives.
Same with your boss, you don'tgive your boss a bunch of
half-baked stuff.
I mean that never works out.
Your boss wants things polishedand finished, right?
Eric Dickmann (03:47):
Yes.
Well, I love this idea ofhomework because I think that
that's so true.
I see this particularly inservice interactions where it
seems like the first response toa service interaction is to ask
the customer to do somethingmore.
It's not bad enough that they'rereaching out for a problem.
It's that now that you're askingthem to do something more to
sort of prove that they have aproblem instead of accepting it
(04:09):
at face value, it's veryirritating.
Erik Newton (04:11):
A big form that should be auto filled out once
you know my address, because I'ma customer.
I shouldn't have to fill out 10more fields.
How about when you are reallyupset as a customer and you
submit something to get help andthe email that comes back says-
No reply at.
at, At your provider.
And it says nobody is monitoringthis.
(04:33):
Nobody will reply to this email.
I'm like, Hmm.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure I wanted to knowthat about you.
Eric Dickmann (04:40):
I know.
That's exactly right.
I've noticed that as well.
I think a great example is Icalled into a doctor's office
recently and you know, you getthe automated voice response
system and it goes through thechoices, right?
You know, press number one ifyou're another physician, press
number two if you're a labcalling, press number three, if
you're not.
You know, you go through all thenumbers and like number nine, if
(05:00):
you're a patient, press numbernine.
Erik Newton (05:02):
The patient, people who pay our bills,
Eric Dickmann (05:04):
Right.
Shouldn't that be number one?
It was like, no.
And it just shows sort of thementality, the thinking of an
organization like that.
Like patients are our lastpriority, which is, it's so.
sad.
Erik Newton (05:15):
Yeah, it's not good.
We wouldn't put them in the topstandard deviation of providers.
But I'm sure there's people whoare doing it right in medical
care.
You know, I'm sure there'speople that have figured out in
dent dentistry or plasticsurgery, or people who are
getting regular skin treatmentsand stuff.
They probably figured out betterways to do that, to get the
maximum amount of recurringvisits from their customers.
Eric Dickmann (05:37):
Competition is a beautiful thing, right?
If you're an optional service,you have to really work for it a
little bit more.
But you know, this is a topicthat we could literally spend
hours going through examples ofbad customer service that we
won't subject the audience tothat.
But I know at Milestone, youguys have thought about this a
lot.
You said you're a platform andan agency, but you came up with
(05:58):
an acronym that I thought wasreally interesting.
And I'd love to go through thatwith the audience today.
This acronym that you came upwith was TEAM.
First of all, if you could justsort of give us a high level of
what that means in your mind andthen let's sort of go through it
step by step.
Erik Newton (06:11):
Yeah.
So in order to you know, notgive homework to the audience,
let's put this in four buckets-Team Track, Engage, Appreciate,
and Mobilize.
So we're going to talk about 15,20 ideas in the next 20 minutes,
and they all fall into Track,Engage, Appreciate, and
Mobilize.
So tracking.
(06:32):
You know that good, PeterDrucker, everybody you know, you
can't fix what you can't track.
You know, you're not going togrow if you're not paying
attention to it.
So what's in your dashboard?
You know, what's in yourdashboard about your customer?
Whether you're a small companyor a big company, if you are a
subscription business, most ofyour revenue, 80% probably is
(06:54):
coming from recurring business.
So shouldn't that be where thereport starts, but it often
starts with sales.
Who are we competing against?
Where can we win anothercontract?
Where can we win more business?
The dashboard itself tells yousomething about your orientation
,and the first step to solvingthis problem.
Or first step to getting morecustomer obsessed is figure out
(07:15):
what data you're even payingattention to.
That's the first.
So the order of revenue I justmentioned is usually about 80%,
recurring 20% there's a chunkthat is upsell, which is also a
really important metric.
Eric Dickmann (07:31):
It's amazing like how many organizations don't
even have a dashboard.
They're not really tracking.
It's some simple spreadsheets orit's a lot of gut-feel, these
are our best customers, this isthe kind of thing that people
like to buy, this is when theylike to buy it.
But they really don't have anyempirical data behind it.
Erik Newton (07:48):
No, no.
So look at what you're tracking.
If you're not tracking anything,I've got some ideas for you.
One popular, it's getting alittle bit dated now, but NPS-
Net Promoter Score.
So a Net Promoter Score meanshow many people are not
indifferent about your business?
What percent of the people thatfill out that surveys would say,
(08:08):
I like this podcast, I'drecommend this podcast.
This is good stuff.
And you get a score of between20 and 50, typically for most
B2B businesses.
The problem with NPS is that itis a lagging indicator.
It is an indicator of how happyyour customer was last week or
last month, but it doesn't tellyou how you're doing right now.
(08:32):
And it's sort of a cumulative,somewhat backward looking.
Another indicator of how you'redoing, and it's a pretty easy
number.
And it's one that people areinterested in is upsell.
Are your customers buying morestuff from you?
If you're a store, are theycoming back to your store?
If you're a service provider,are they extending their
contracts?
If you're a platform, are theyextending their capacity of
(08:52):
license?
You know, Salesforce hasfantastic and upsell.
They buy all these companies andthey add on small companies and
small features, and then theycome around and tell you about
them.
But you got to like what you'regetting from Salesforce to buy
more, to buy more of that.
So upsell is really important.
I think it's under emphasized.
You know, I've recently beenmore active on accounts.
(09:14):
And I've been like executivesponsoring accounts, I see
upsell opportunities every othermeeting.
From accounts that I work on, Iwant to see them every week.
And if we don't have a lot totalk about, we'll get off the
call in five or ten minutes.
So upsell is huge.
Renewal is obviously renewal,attrition, churn.
This is what so many techcompanies in the valley are you
(09:34):
know, that's where so many ofthese big valuations come from
on the SaaS companies.
But what's the renewal rate?
Are you renewing?
And are you expanding theaccounts?
And the calculation itself is alittle bit, you know, a lot of
thought needs to go into whatyou're going to measure.
Let's say, a simple one is if Ihad a hundred customers last
year at the end of December, thefollowing December, how many of
(09:57):
those original 100 are stillwith me?
How many of them renewed?
So do I have 93?
I've got 7% account churn, thenthere's revenue churn and
product usage trends, so on.
But that's tracking, that's theT in teams.
Eric Dickmann (10:12):
I think that's so interesting too, because
especially when you're talkingabout renewals and all these
subscription-based businesses,it's so common for them to have
a first year promotion.
You know, the cost is about halfof what it normally is on the
renewal.
And then those renewals comealong and all of a sudden, you
see mass cancellations becausemaybe people enjoyed the product
at half price, but they're notgoing to see the value at full
(10:34):
price.
And you've got to watch that.
Erik Newton (10:36):
Yeah, it's always the problem with discounting.
I mean you'd always rather addvalue and communicate value, and
build relationship.
And that's part of beingcustomer obsessed as they like
you too much to fire you.
right?
Probably like, you bring them onpodcasts, you cover them in your
blog, they speak in your events,you go out to dinner with them.
All these things I'll talk aboutin Mobilize.
(10:57):
But next in the acronym is E forengage, meet regularly.
I never can understand anyongoing relationships that don't
have recurring meetings.
You know, Outlook makes thatreally easy for us.
I don't think of a once a monthmeetings going to do it.
If that problem is going to bestale and they're going to be
(11:17):
frustrated.
And you're, kind of bleedinggoodwill if it's three weeks of
not addressing their problem.
I like to see customers everyweek.
Like I said, if you don't havesomething to talk about, you can
sign off early.
I email my customers a couple oftimes a week between meetings
and what I'm doing there is whenI'm rreading, I'm researching,
(11:39):
I'm looking at what's onForrester, I'm reading blogs.
When I find something that'srelevant to one of those
customers, one of thoseMilestone customers, I just send
it over- is this helpful?
And I ask for that feedback andyou know, am I filling up your
inbox too much?
Eric Dickmann (11:54):
But you're not asking them for something,
you're providing some value.
Yeah.
And yeah, and it's even morethan that, Eric.
I want them to know that I'mthinking about I don't have a
lot of customers.
I'm executive sponsor on acouple of accounts, three
accounts right now.
And I think about them everyday.
And one of them calls me almostevery day.
Yeah.
Erik Newton (12:12):
To make the inbound to me when they need help.
But you know, I just want themto know I'm thinking about their
business.
The next time I get on the call,it's sort of like, naturally,
how can we make, how, what elsecan we do for you?
And it, it expands therelationship.
So to me, it's about caring.
It's about empathy that I thinkabout you.
And I think about your business.
She told me she was going to LasVegas and I saw on TV, some of
(12:36):
the new things that were inVegas.
So I researched them for her,put together an email and said,
Hey, here's some new stuff inVegas.
Nobody's been to Vegas in 18months cause it was COVID.
You know, sent them over to her.
I'm like, you might want tocheck these out.
And she just,
Eric Dickmann (12:48):
It's a personal touch.
Erik Newton (12:49):
want to be cared about.
It's personal.
That can go a long way toimproving the retention.
You know, you can't cover for aproduct that's not working, but
you can cover some of the edges.
How about texting?
Can you text or team chat orSlack your customers?
How many of your customers arein your speed dial?
And if you text them, will theytext you back?
(13:09):
That's a totally differentrelationship.
If somebody is managing a bigbook of 30 or 40, this
engagement at a text level.
Text is obviously more intimatethan email, right?
Email is this kind of industrialplace where I'm doing a lot of
my desktop workflow, but myemails on my text is on my
(13:30):
personal phone.
Eric Dickmann (13:33):
I love that.
You know, just to that point,it's interesting because I work
with clients, I work withvendors all the time, and every
once in a while, I haven't heardfrom a vendor in a while, so I
want to reach out to them, just,you know, ping them.
So maybe I'll ask them aquestion.
And it's interesting, eventhough some of them have been
excellent to work with, theydon't respond because it's not a
request for business, right?
(13:54):
It's a question.
And it's like, you can't dothat.
You know, you have to quarter ofkeep those lines of
communication, you want to buildthat relationship, so when
business does come along,there's an easy opening to sort
of present that business.
Erik Newton (14:06):
Yeah.
You're top of mind.
But you're not only are you topof mind, you're top of heart.
You're so familiar and you'reentering into the friend zone.
Is sorta my style, like youknow, my ancestors are from the
Mediterranean, I have a realwarm engagement style.
And I think that serves well.
And customers like, everybodylikes attention, it's
(14:27):
validating.
And when you're communicatinglike that, you can find problems
so early, right?
The earlier you find theproblem, the smaller it is, the
less, you know, the less loss ofgoodwill that's happened cause
they haven't been frustrated fora long time with it.
Here's another idea aboutengagement.
Do an interview just like this,Eric.
You know, like I'm not saying todo a podcast, but to do a
(14:50):
qualitative interview, NPSscores are a little bit weird,
they're a little bit unnatural,they tend to go to the platform
user, not to the executive.
But, you know, you can do aquarterly business review, but
what about just, Hey, like,could I schedule 15 minutes of
time?
I want to hear how it's going, Iwant to hear what your
(15:11):
perspectives are, I want to hearchallenges.
You know, what can we do better?
What can I do better is sohumble.
There's nothing like that in theNPS.
NPS is this, you know, dry cutnumber.
But are you interviewing yourexecutives, you know, your
executive customers.
It's easy to do, it'squalitative research, right?
If you think about how we domarketing on the outbound side,
(15:35):
we love quantitative research,we see things in bulk in the
thousands.
But you know, if you do three orfour qualitative interviews,
you're going to get a differentand better read, a different
read certainly than thequantitative.
Eric Dickmann (15:49):
Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to
the podcast.
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Services.
Now back to the podcast.
Well, one of the things I reallylike about that is that we are
bombarded by surveys.
And I think for a lot of people,surveys have become an annoyance
rather than a real opportunityto provide feedback because
businesses have dropped the ballquite frankly, and they survey
their customers too much andpeople get the impression that
(16:55):
nothing is going to happen asthe result of this survey.
You're simply trying to makesome customer service agent feel
better, you know?
Because their performance reportwill be better because they
scored.
Erik Newton (17:04):
Homework, right, Eric?
Eric Dickmann (17:05):
Yeah, its homework again.
Erik Newton (17:06):
You're making me do homework.
I don't know what I get out ofthat.
Eric Dickmann (17:08):
Yeah.
If I know, I'm going to callthem next day.
Erik Newton (17:12):
NPS.
Eric Dickmann (17:13):
Yeah, right.
No, you do need, it.
But I mean, if I scored somebodylow on NPS, and then I got a
call the next day saying, Hey,we're really concerned, you
know, the score.
Can we talk about this in moredetail?
That would be meaningful to me.
If I score somebody low and Inever hear anything from the
company.
you just wonder what the pointwas.
Erik Newton (17:30):
Uh, Uh Yeah, I've definitely been in companies
where the bad scores scoresescalate only quickly because it
was a subscription business andyou do have executives falling
up.
Which is also on the verge ofself-serving, right?
They're following up because I'mmad, they're not following up
because they care.
They're not following up causethey want to help.
They're just following upbecause they think that they're
(17:50):
going to get fired.
Eric Dickmann (17:51):
That lagging.
indicator as you discussed,right?
Erik Newton (17:53):
lagging.
Yeah, I'm already, is it betternow?
Or like it's even moretransactional at that point.
It's better than nothing, butit's not texting you before
anything went bad and justmaking sure things are going
good.
So that's T and E track andengage.
Now next is Appreciate.
And we've already started totouch on this, but given the
(18:15):
gift of time, everybody's busy,everybody values their own time.
Are you reaching out?
Are you calling?
Are you communicating?
And you know, I miss going outto dinner.
Customer and cliententertainment is so important,
it's so part of my job to spendmoney and my shtick at my last
(18:36):
job was, I'm kind of a wineenthusiast.
So I would connect with peopleabout wine and I ask, what kind
of wine do you like?
And if they ever did me a favor,wrote me a review, I'd send them
a half case of the wine, youknow?
I mean it's a decent gift ifthey drink, but it's connected
to them and they know I askedand I listened.
(18:58):
That's you know, showing myappreciation.
But the other thing that needsto happen when you are giving
the gift of time is to bepresent.
That if you are going to be infront of customers, and you're
the kind of exec that's doingsome Siegel exec, you know, exec
support on an account and you'resorta checked out during and
(19:21):
they see it.
Yeah, that's terrible.
If you know like, God forbidyour phone buzzes or something
and you get distracted.
People notice, they feelunimportant if you divert your
attention from them.
I had actually a CEO at a priorcompany, and he was the busiest
guy I knew, hardest working guy.
(19:41):
I knew I never, I went out tolunch with him a number of times
as a customer.
And then later as a friend andcontact.
Never ever saw him look at hisphone during time with me,
Eric Dickmann (19:54):
He was fully present.
Erik Newton (19:54):
Never saw him do it.
Now, when I did go to work forhim and he did that all the
time.
He would look at his phoneduring the meetings and you kind
of realize, okay, I'm lost him abit here.
But he would never do it withcustomers.
He was really good at beingpresent.
That's a great skill, but it'snot just the mechanism of trying
to be appreciative, but likebeing there for them.
(20:18):
Another thing that kind ofsurprises me is like, if you ask
a customer for a reference, doyou send a reference?
Do you send a gift?
Oh yeah, reference is sovaluable.
You're working a$50,000 contractand.
they're putting their name andtheir brand and their logo
against your relationship.
(20:40):
And
Eric Dickmann (20:40):
It's a big deal.
Erik Newton (20:42):
And you know, people who are being
transactional, people who aren'tbeing appreciative, sometimes
busy salespeople.
Oh, was I supposed to send agift?
I'm like, what do you usuallysend?
I said, usually a bottle of wineor a bottle of booze, you figure
out what they like sometimes anAmazon gift card.
but she's like, I don't know howto do that, this prior company.
And I'm like, I'll take care ofit for you.
(21:03):
Just give me the email address,I got it.
And then you know, I'll come inand send it.
Those are a couple of those.
Any thoughts or comments?
Eric Dickmann (21:11):
No, that's great.
One of the things that I wasthinking about as you were
talking is that, you know welive in this magnificent online
world right now.
If you want to send somebody aletter, you can go to a site
like postable.com and they willsend a card on your behalf, you
know in something that lookslike handwriting.
You don't have to go to the postoffice, buy a stamp, stick it in
(21:32):
the mail.
There are ways to do this thatyou don't even have to leave
your desk.So many easy ways tobuy a simple gift, a gift card,
just a way to show thatappreciation.
And it's amazing how many peopledon't do that.
Erik Newton (21:45):
Yeah, They're not doing it and then the value.
Think about if somebody ishelping you close a sale, it's
an hour of executive timeeffectively, right?
Like your time, my time,whosever, and they're going to
go get on a call for 15 or 20minutes, but they're going to
prep too, right?
Like people don't like to justtumble into a call.
So an hour of exact times, acouple hundred bucks.
And you know, if you'reconsulting or contracting,
(22:06):
whatever, make sure yourecognize the value of their
time before you ask again.
Otherwise it might not work outas well.
And here's a couple of moreadvanced ones on appreciate,
make introductions.
So if you download your LinkedInnetwork, just so you can see it
all in a flat file, I've gotlike 2,600.
(22:29):
It's a lot to look at and youcan sort it a little bit who on
this list would benefit fromknowing somebody else on this
list?
Who would be friends?
Who works in the same city?
Maybe we know people in Idaho,people in Denver.
Maybe they're about the sameage, doing the same kind of
stuff.
Why wouldn't I introduce them?
Now, you're enriching theirlife.
you're showing your appreciationfor what they do for you, and
(22:50):
you're being a good friend.
I started doing like small likeround tables and office hours
kind of things, because the Zoomfatigue is getting, you know
like, webinars getting a littlebit tired with this much Zoom.
So you know, letting peopleinteract.
And then I could see there'sthree people in the healthcare
industry.
I'm like, Hey, you guys are inthe healthcare industry.
(23:11):
And you know, I can see youremail addresses.
Let me send this to the three ofyou.
Maybe you guys want to connect.
That's going the extra mile,that's being customer obsessed,
and these weren't evencustomers, these are just
prospects.
Not just prospects, but valuableprospects.
Eric Dickmann (23:25):
No.
I love that idea because itdoesn't always have to be
something tangible.
It can be that introductionwhich could be extremely
valuable.
But again, it's a great way toshow that you're thinking about
your customers, that youunderstand their interests, and
you understand why somebody elsemight be valuable for them to
meet.
Erik Newton (23:41):
Yeah, intellectually that's right.
But it shows that you care.
Like it's so differentiate, Imean like, you know, handwritten
notes is good, but you know,this is like a handwritten idea
of I could give you a new friendand I've heard so many times
that mathematically theconnections of your connections
are the most high potential partof your network.
(24:04):
So you personally know about 400or 500 people, but they each
know 400 or 500 people, and it'sin that second network that you
have a lot of reach out into thesocial graph.
So that's one.
Another one is giving leads.
Do you buy things from yourcustomers?
Do you like, well, we're goingto switch, we are going to
switch vendors so that we'regiving business where we get
(24:25):
business.
That's part of it.
And do you help them build theirbusiness?
You think about somebody elseyou might know that could use
their services.
Do you just make introductions?
Hey, I thought these guys mightyou know, need your consulting
or your product or your service.
So those are some of the
Eric Dickmann (24:40):
I love that.
Yeah.
Erik Newton (24:41):
appreciate, so we're in the T, the E, the A,
and now, we're going to the M,and that's mobilize.
And I got a couple more M's inthis mnemonic.
Eric Dickmann (24:52):
Perfect.
Okay.
Erik Newton (24:55):
Meet deadlines.
You can't miss deadlines.
Like the customers asking foryour commitment and they're
judging whether you hit it.
So you have to meet alldeadlines, a document, an email,
a response, and be clear aboutwhether you're talking about
this Thursday and tonight atmidnight or does Thursday and
tonight at 5:00 PM Eastern,you're East Coast and I'm West
(25:15):
Coast.
It's two, o'clock my time, youknow?
Meet that deadline, meet SLA..
SLA is service level agreement.
You know, your contract oftensays- I will do these things
within this amount of time orI'm effectively in breach of
contract.
You have to meet the SLS.
You gotta be conscious of them,your team has to read their
(25:35):
documents, you guys have torefresh yourself.
This is what we said we would doand this is how we be a good
teammate here with our customer.
We meet our SLS, make it right.
This one's pretty obvious, whencustomers are mad and they
escalate, something's got to getfixed.
I guess the other M here wouldbe, Make Good.
You know if something's broken,you give them something extra,
(25:58):
you give flexibility, you givemore product, more service.
But you have to make it rightfor people, you have to mobilize
your company.
And some of the great stories ofthe customer, the original
customer obsessed, Nordstrom,Southwest Airlines, people being
able to fix things, people atthe great hotels that are able
to just, they've got some budgetto take care of stuff.
(26:20):
Oh, you need batteries?
I'll send somebody to the storeto get them for you.
Oh, you need, if you need a newpair of socks or something like
that.
Giving people the ability tomake things right is, that was
the original, the Nordstrommodel.
Those are a couple of their
Eric Dickmann (26:38):
No, I think that that's really interesting
because I'm a huge believer inempowering employees to make
things right.
I also am a believer in that thecustomer is not always right.
There can be some difficultcustomers that are never
satisfied and you can turn yourorganization sort of inside out
trying to make them happy, andthey will never be happy.
(27:00):
And I think there does need tobe a point where you look at a
customer and say- Is this youknow, good time going for
something that Is never going towork out?
Yeah.
is this a good marriage?
That's exactly right.
Erik Newton (27:10):
Maybe we don't do it next year.
Eric Dickmann (27:12):
And you know, these are few and far between.
But I think the bigger issuethere is the empowerment.
And too often in anorganization, people are just
not empowered to make somethingright.
When you look at it and say, whynot?
You know, what is the hindranceto giving them the autonomy to
make this right?
Erik Newton (27:28):
Yeah, sort of a power and control model.
Eric Dickmann (27:32):
Yeah.
Right, exactly.
Erik Newton (27:33):
Decentralized thinking.
You know, the customer's notalways right, but they're
usually right because they'rethe customer, they have an
expectation, and most of theresponsibility is on us to align
to that expectation and to keepit right for them.
Eric Dickmann (27:49):
Or we set the expectations incorrectly?
Erik Newton (27:52):
Yeah.
That usually leads to problemsand those are some of the things
you got to iron out inonboarding.
And the first couple of times,there's escalations.
Usually, they'll give a coupleof mulligans.
You know, customers will giveyou some space to work out these
things and look at the contractand you know, have a few
meetings.
But after a while you gotta, yougotta do all these things to get
(28:13):
customer obsession right.
So that's reaction.
What about pre action?
You know, think about MinorityReport, if you know the movie, a
great concept of pre-crime.
Well, what about pre acting?
Just eliminate problems,eliminate friction that would be
frustrating if you were thecustomer, that would be
frustrating if you have a pickycustomer or whatever type you
(28:35):
have.
Preact to reduce these things sothat you're mobilizing your
organization so that there'sless tickets being opened, less
support tickets coming, ask forfeedback.
And then if all these things aregoing right, and you've done the
team, ask for reviews.
And this is a really humblingexperience.
The way I do this, at Milestonein a private company, as I said,
(28:57):
can you do me a favor?
You know, could you write areview about the product on G2
crowd or on Trust Radius, or.
Clutch.
You know, those search engineGoogle has reoriented the search
results to be biased towardsobjective review sites over
brands.
Google prefers those sitesbecause they are answering the
(29:19):
question, which is the best ofthis and that.
So you need to manage yourreputation, but there's no way
to game it.
You know, they check theLinkedIn of the people filling
it out.
They often check, make you provethat you're a product user and,
you know, send them a screenshotso forth.
So all of these things have tobe right.
And within Humility, you ask fora favor.
And you get a review, and it'son the internet for 10 or 20
(29:42):
years.
It lasts almost forever.
It's huge value.
So that is the TEAM acronym.
That's the structure of customerobsession.
I've got a couple of morestories and anecdotes, but.
Eric Dickmann (29:52):
No, No, I love that because you want something
that's easy to understand.
And I think it's a mindsetshift.
You know you have to move awayfrom sort of internal focus,
product focus, and start tothink more about putting
yourself in the shoes of yourcustomer.
And, you know, we all interactwith businesses every day and we
know what makes us happy, weknow what makes us fulfilled.
(30:13):
And it's amazing how often thatdoesn't translate into our work
life.
Erik Newton (30:17):
It It is amazing, you know?
We get, like you said, we justget the priorities kind of
wrong.
We prioritize internal stuffover external stuff.
That's not obsessed, that'sbeing bureaucratic, right?
That's the nature of bureaucracythat feels impersonal and
doesn't make us happy.
So this acronym is pretty easyto remember, but you want to be
(30:38):
part of their team.
I think we've all been inservice positions or we've been
on brand side or service sidewhen people say, well, we see
you as part of our team.
You know, we count you as ateam.
You had been invited sometimesto the employee, holiday
parties, stuff like that.
You really feel like an extendedpart of the team.
That's the goal is for that tobe true and real and authentic
(31:00):
that they see you as part of theteam.
But you gotta work at it.
You know, we've just reviewedabout 16 tactics that you can
use to get there.
You know, another constructthat's really useful is the
trusted advisor, which is it'sgetting it's a little bit dated
now, but in marketing, I oftentrain salespeople after they do
(31:23):
product training.
So they come out of producttraining and they talk product
and I'm like, yeah, that's notreally what the customer wants
to hear, they want to hearsolutions.
And if you're selling pots andpans, you're going door to door,
or let's say Cutco Knives,really good product, love the
product.
But somebody comes by andthey're like, buy a knife.
You could have this knife orthis knife, or this knife.
(31:45):
Like it's you know, they haven'tfigured out if I'm going to be
cutting a lot of meat or if I'ma fishermen, or if you know, I
need a tool for the backyard orwhatever it is, they don't
really know me yet.
But if you're a trusted advisor,it's really about the
discussion, like this kind of adiscussion where you and I are
exchanging ideas that help meknow you and you know, me.
(32:09):
I gave the example of I had atax problem a couple of years
ago, a complicated tax problem.
And I called up some attorneys,you know, One of them just
started consulting with me.
She says, I'll, I'll give yousome advice right now.
I've dealt with this before.
And this is how I would go atit.
She gave about 20 or 30 minutesof lawyering.
(32:30):
And I'd be like, well, I feelbetter.
I feel like this is going to,and she won the business, and
she did a great job.
Everything worked out good.
That's trusted advisor.
If she had said, I have apackage for this kind of real
estate tax issue, my fixedpackage, my product, A, B and C
is 3,000.
5000.
and I need a retainer.
(32:51):
She's like, you know, it's acouple hundred bucks an hour, it
was reasonable.
And she knew the people I wasdealing with.
That was great.
And the feeling of talking to atrusted advisor.
And when you think about it interms of accounting or legal
problems that are big, not likejust knives, pots, and pans,
then you get how you want to bewhen you're selling software.
(33:13):
Even if your widget is only acouple thousand bucks, it's
better if you communicate thatvalue to them in and make them
kind of believe in you and yourproduct, and that you
understand.
It goes back to this, all thethings we were talking about in
customer obsession, this works alot on in the sales cycle with
prospects.
Eric Dickmann (33:33):
Well, and I think, especially if you're in a
service industry.
Adding that value before yousort of aggressively go for the
sale can make such a differencein building up that trust.
And I've dealt with far too manyservice professionals that they
immediately want, you know tosign you up for, like you said,
a package or some sort of aservice.
It's like, Hey, I've just gotthis simple question, let's
build a little trust here.
And maybe there's a lot morebusiness that could come your
(33:55):
way.
I I'd like to take a dip my toein the water first before I go
there.
And some are very reluctant todo it.
Erik Newton (34:03):
Yeah, that's product led growth.
That's the freemium and service,right?
That they're giving you a tasteand you're seeing if it works,
and then if you guys likeworking together, I had a
plumber come out, and I thoughtI had figured out what the
problem was.
And so I was like, they came outand then they looked at it, I
(34:24):
showed them some pictures, andhe said, and then he said, you
know, it's like$6,000 to replacethat pipe.
I'm like, nevermind.
I'll figure something else out.
He goes, and here's a bill for$179 for coming out for the
estimate.
Okay.
You know what I did?
I went back to my aunt, I paidit cause I didn't, I hadn't
asked that they wouldn't dothat.
(34:44):
I went on Yelp and I toldeverybody, this company charges
$179 to come out, be careful.
That's going to be on theinternet forever.
Eric Dickmann (34:52):
Yes.
Yeah, the power of,
Erik Newton (34:55):
meIf they told me that, I would have said, I'm
okay.
I'm not sure I want to investthat yet on the estimate.
Go ahead.
Eric Dickmann (35:02):
Yeah, no, it was just, It's$179, right?
But that negative review, likeyou said, will last kind of
forever and was it really worth$179 for that guy to do that?
I think sometimes the trade offthat people are making is very
poor.
I had a recent example, myselfof an accountant who did a
terrible job for me.
And I kept saying, you know,you're a review based business.
(35:24):
This isn't good, you know?
Let's end this relationship on apositive note and they refused
to do it.
Erik Newton (35:29):
Threaten him or her into doing the right thing.
Right.
Eric Dickmann (35:32):
And they wouldn't do it.
They were so stubborn just to beright.
And yeah, so it cost them a badreview, which is unfortunate.
You know, Erik, I think we couldtalk about this stuff for hours.
This is really good.
I'm gonna make sure that at theend of this, we're going to
write a blog.
So we're going to list all thisstuff in the blog, but I would
love it if you could just sharewith people where they can find
out more about you, where theycan find out more about
(35:53):
Milestone, where's your spot onthe net?
Erik Newton (35:56):
Yeah, LinkedIn's a good place to start.
So linkedin/eriknewton, my workfor Milestone Internet and a lot
of resources and white papers Iput together are up in
milestoneinternet.com/resources.
You can have a look there.
You can reach me for anything.
I might be able to help you withat erik.n@milestoneinternet.com.
(36:19):
And if you come in on LinkedIn,please mention the podcast at
Eric and you know, we'll be sureto connect there.
Eric Dickmann (36:27):
Hey, that's great.
You know, this is fascinating.
Like I said, it's one of myfavorite topics to talk about.
There are a lot of bad examplesout there, but boy, when you see
good ones, it just makes yousmile, right?
Because you can have a lot ofsuccess if you really change
your mindset, you becomecustomer, you look at your
processes and say, how can we dothis better with the customer in
mind?
It can create some pretty bigdividends for your organization.
Erik Newton (36:50):
Absolutely.
Eric Dickmann (36:50):
Yeah.
Erik, thank you so much forbeing here.
Really enjoyed our conversationtoday.
Erik Newton (36:53):
Thank you, Eric.
Eric Dickmann (36:57):
Thank you for joining us on this episode of
The Virtual CMO podcast.
For more episodes, go tofiveechelon.com/podcast to
subscribe through your podcastplayer of choice.
And if you'd like to developconsistent lead flow and a
highly effective marketingstrategy, visit fiveechelon.com
to learn more about our VirtualCMO consulting services.
Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast.
I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
In this podcast, we haveconversations with marketing
professionals who share thestrategies, tactics, and mindset
you can use to improve theeffectiveness of your marketing
activities and grow yourbusiness.
Erik, welcome to The Virtual CMOpodcast.
Very glad you could join ustoday.
Erik Newton (00:22):
Thanks! Glad to be here.
Eric Dickmann (00:25):
I love our topic today because we're going to
really talk about the customerand being obsessed.
And how do you know if you're anobsessed business about your
customer?
And you know, I don't want tolead things off here by being
overly pessimistic, but I thinkas a consumer, it's pretty much
assumed that most businesses arenot going to be very customer
obsessed that they're not goingto focus too much on me as a
customer.
(00:45):
What do you think is the stateof the customer today with most
businesses?
Erik Newton (00:50):
You know maybe like a lot of things, it's a standard
distribution of excellent toaverage, to poor.
So maybe there's 3% in thatfirst standard deviation and 13%
that are getting a B+ or better.
But I think the society isorganized into making money.
And now, you're a publiccompany, you're supposed to be
(01:11):
making profits, you're supposedto be making the stock go up.
So you get focused on money andmaybe you forget that the place
where the money comes from isthe customer.
So if you want to think aboutmoney and you want to be, you
know, profitable and successful,I think you can't go wrong being
customer obsessed.
Everything about the customer ishelpful for your business.
(01:32):
Everything you do, any kind ofservice provider, but
particularly if you're in asubscription business where
people are staying with youmonth to month or quarter to
quarter, you have to renew.
It's like being an employeethat's on a shorter contract,
right?
If your contract as an employeegot renewed every month, you
would really be focused on whatyou got to do this month to get
(01:53):
to the next month.
But I think people lose sight ofthat.
And I heard this term customerobsessed from Forrester, and it
helps because I work in SiliconValley.
You know our agency is a productand service company.
And when we go to talk to theanalyst, when we do briefings
and inquiries, They say, well,you know, prove to us that
(02:14):
you're customer obsessed.
Like you know, they're helpingus organize the communication
and the presentation lead withthe customer, lead with the
customer's problems.
It's more fun.
There's always a time and aplace to talk product or
solution, but it's usually notthe beginning.
It's usually sort of the middleof that process.
Eric Dickmann (02:32):
Yeah, I agree.
And I think you know being fromSilicon Valley, you certainly
are in the hub of technology.
And I think a lot oftechnologists are engineers at
heart, right?
They are looking at things froma product standpoint, not
necessarily from our customer'sstandpoint.
Give you a great example.
I just got a message the otherday from a provider.
I had a bill that I needed topay so they sent me a text
(02:53):
reminder.
I go to their website and theysay, well, please enter your
bill number.
Well, how the heck do I knowwhat my bill number is?
I'm responding a text message,you know?
But that's the way their systemis probably indexed to know what
to do, but it's completelyoutside the realm of what I, as
a customer have available at myfingertips.
just wonder.
Erik Newton (03:12):
Maybe they've gone backwards here.
At first, you might've beenhappy to get a reminder that
this bill is due and it's a goodtime to pay.
And now you feel like you gotgiven homework.
Which is the things I like tosay, don't give your boss
homework and don't give yourcustomers homework.
Make things easy, right?
Where my job as a marketer is tobe packaging things so that
they're ultra consumable andwe're maximizing that the
(03:36):
benefit and the esteem, and thevalue that that customer
perceives.
Same with your boss, you don'tgive your boss a bunch of
half-baked stuff.
I mean that never works out.
Your boss wants things polishedand finished, right?
Eric Dickmann (03:47):
Yes.
Well, I love this idea ofhomework because I think that
that's so true.
I see this particularly inservice interactions where it
seems like the first response toa service interaction is to ask
the customer to do somethingmore.
It's not bad enough that they'rereaching out for a problem.
It's that now that you're askingthem to do something more to
sort of prove that they have aproblem instead of accepting it
(04:09):
at face value, it's veryirritating.
Erik Newton (04:11):
A big form that should be auto filled out once
you know my address, because I'ma customer.
I shouldn't have to fill out 10more fields.
How about when you are reallyupset as a customer and you
submit something to get help andthe email that comes back says-
No reply at.
at, At your provider.
And it says nobody is monitoringthis.
(04:33):
Nobody will reply to this email.
I'm like, Hmm.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure I wanted to knowthat about you.
Eric Dickmann (04:40):
I know.
That's exactly right.
I've noticed that as well.
I think a great example is Icalled into a doctor's office
recently and you know, you getthe automated voice response
system and it goes through thechoices, right?
You know, press number one ifyou're another physician, press
number two if you're a labcalling, press number three, if
you're not.
You know, you go through all thenumbers and like number nine, if
(05:00):
you're a patient, press numbernine.
Erik Newton (05:02):
The patient, people who pay our bills,
Eric Dickmann (05:04):
Right.
Shouldn't that be number one?
It was like, no.
And it just shows sort of thementality, the thinking of an
organization like that.
Like patients are our lastpriority, which is, it's so.
sad.
Erik Newton (05:15):
Yeah, it's not good.
We wouldn't put them in the topstandard deviation of providers.
But I'm sure there's people whoare doing it right in medical
care.
You know, I'm sure there'speople that have figured out in
dent dentistry or plasticsurgery, or people who are
getting regular skin treatmentsand stuff.
They probably figured out betterways to do that, to get the
maximum amount of recurringvisits from their customers.
Eric Dickmann (05:37):
Competition is a beautiful thing, right?
If you're an optional service,you have to really work for it a
little bit more.
But you know, this is a topicthat we could literally spend
hours going through examples ofbad customer service that we
won't subject the audience tothat.
But I know at Milestone, youguys have thought about this a
lot.
You said you're a platform andan agency, but you came up with
(05:58):
an acronym that I thought wasreally interesting.
And I'd love to go through thatwith the audience today.
This acronym that you came upwith was TEAM.
First of all, if you could justsort of give us a high level of
what that means in your mind andthen let's sort of go through it
step by step.
Erik Newton (06:11):
Yeah.
So in order to you know, notgive homework to the audience,
let's put this in four buckets-Team Track, Engage, Appreciate,
and Mobilize.
So we're going to talk about 15,20 ideas in the next 20 minutes,
and they all fall into Track,Engage, Appreciate, and
Mobilize.
So tracking.
(06:32):
You know that good, PeterDrucker, everybody you know, you
can't fix what you can't track.
You know, you're not going togrow if you're not paying
attention to it.
So what's in your dashboard?
You know, what's in yourdashboard about your customer?
Whether you're a small companyor a big company, if you are a
subscription business, most ofyour revenue, 80% probably is
(06:54):
coming from recurring business.
So shouldn't that be where thereport starts, but it often
starts with sales.
Who are we competing against?
Where can we win anothercontract?
Where can we win more business?
The dashboard itself tells yousomething about your orientation
,and the first step to solvingthis problem.
Or first step to getting morecustomer obsessed is figure out
(07:15):
what data you're even payingattention to.
That's the first.
So the order of revenue I justmentioned is usually about 80%,
recurring 20% there's a chunkthat is upsell, which is also a
really important metric.
Eric Dickmann (07:31):
It's amazing like how many organizations don't
even have a dashboard.
They're not really tracking.
It's some simple spreadsheets orit's a lot of gut-feel, these
are our best customers, this isthe kind of thing that people
like to buy, this is when theylike to buy it.
But they really don't have anyempirical data behind it.
Erik Newton (07:48):
No, no.
So look at what you're tracking.
If you're not tracking anything,I've got some ideas for you.
One popular, it's getting alittle bit dated now, but NPS-
Net Promoter Score.
So a Net Promoter Score meanshow many people are not
indifferent about your business?
What percent of the people thatfill out that surveys would say,
(08:08):
I like this podcast, I'drecommend this podcast.
This is good stuff.
And you get a score of between20 and 50, typically for most
B2B businesses.
The problem with NPS is that itis a lagging indicator.
It is an indicator of how happyyour customer was last week or
last month, but it doesn't tellyou how you're doing right now.
(08:32):
And it's sort of a cumulative,somewhat backward looking.
Another indicator of how you'redoing, and it's a pretty easy
number.
And it's one that people areinterested in is upsell.
Are your customers buying morestuff from you?
If you're a store, are theycoming back to your store?
If you're a service provider,are they extending their
contracts?
If you're a platform, are theyextending their capacity of
(08:52):
license?
You know, Salesforce hasfantastic and upsell.
They buy all these companies andthey add on small companies and
small features, and then theycome around and tell you about
them.
But you got to like what you'regetting from Salesforce to buy
more, to buy more of that.
So upsell is really important.
I think it's under emphasized.
You know, I've recently beenmore active on accounts.
(09:14):
And I've been like executivesponsoring accounts, I see
upsell opportunities every othermeeting.
From accounts that I work on, Iwant to see them every week.
And if we don't have a lot totalk about, we'll get off the
call in five or ten minutes.
So upsell is huge.
Renewal is obviously renewal,attrition, churn.
This is what so many techcompanies in the valley are you
(09:34):
know, that's where so many ofthese big valuations come from
on the SaaS companies.
But what's the renewal rate?
Are you renewing?
And are you expanding theaccounts?
And the calculation itself is alittle bit, you know, a lot of
thought needs to go into whatyou're going to measure.
Let's say, a simple one is if Ihad a hundred customers last
year at the end of December, thefollowing December, how many of
(09:57):
those original 100 are stillwith me?
How many of them renewed?
So do I have 93?
I've got 7% account churn, thenthere's revenue churn and
product usage trends, so on.
But that's tracking, that's theT in teams.
Eric Dickmann (10:12):
I think that's so interesting too, because
especially when you're talkingabout renewals and all these
subscription-based businesses,it's so common for them to have
a first year promotion.
You know, the cost is about halfof what it normally is on the
renewal.
And then those renewals comealong and all of a sudden, you
see mass cancellations becausemaybe people enjoyed the product
at half price, but they're notgoing to see the value at full
(10:34):
price.
And you've got to watch that.
Erik Newton (10:36):
Yeah, it's always the problem with discounting.
I mean you'd always rather addvalue and communicate value, and
build relationship.
And that's part of beingcustomer obsessed as they like
you too much to fire you.
right?
Probably like, you bring them onpodcasts, you cover them in your
blog, they speak in your events,you go out to dinner with them.
All these things I'll talk aboutin Mobilize.
(10:57):
But next in the acronym is E forengage, meet regularly.
I never can understand anyongoing relationships that don't
have recurring meetings.
You know, Outlook makes thatreally easy for us.
I don't think of a once a monthmeetings going to do it.
If that problem is going to bestale and they're going to be
(11:17):
frustrated.
And you're, kind of bleedinggoodwill if it's three weeks of
not addressing their problem.
I like to see customers everyweek.
Like I said, if you don't havesomething to talk about, you can
sign off early.
I email my customers a couple oftimes a week between meetings
and what I'm doing there is whenI'm rreading, I'm researching,
(11:39):
I'm looking at what's onForrester, I'm reading blogs.
When I find something that'srelevant to one of those
customers, one of thoseMilestone customers, I just send
it over- is this helpful?
And I ask for that feedback andyou know, am I filling up your
inbox too much?
Eric Dickmann (11:54):
But you're not asking them for something,
you're providing some value.
Yeah.
And yeah, and it's even morethan that, Eric.
I want them to know that I'mthinking about I don't have a
lot of customers.
I'm executive sponsor on acouple of accounts, three
accounts right now.
And I think about them everyday.
And one of them calls me almostevery day.
Yeah.
Erik Newton (12:12):
To make the inbound to me when they need help.
But you know, I just want themto know I'm thinking about their
business.
The next time I get on the call,it's sort of like, naturally,
how can we make, how, what elsecan we do for you?
And it, it expands therelationship.
So to me, it's about caring.
It's about empathy that I thinkabout you.
And I think about your business.
She told me she was going to LasVegas and I saw on TV, some of
(12:36):
the new things that were inVegas.
So I researched them for her,put together an email and said,
Hey, here's some new stuff inVegas.
Nobody's been to Vegas in 18months cause it was COVID.
You know, sent them over to her.
I'm like, you might want tocheck these out.
And she just,
Eric Dickmann (12:48):
It's a personal touch.
Erik Newton (12:49):
want to be cared about.
It's personal.
That can go a long way toimproving the retention.
You know, you can't cover for aproduct that's not working, but
you can cover some of the edges.
How about texting?
Can you text or team chat orSlack your customers?
How many of your customers arein your speed dial?
And if you text them, will theytext you back?
(13:09):
That's a totally differentrelationship.
If somebody is managing a bigbook of 30 or 40, this
engagement at a text level.
Text is obviously more intimatethan email, right?
Email is this kind of industrialplace where I'm doing a lot of
my desktop workflow, but myemails on my text is on my
(13:30):
personal phone.
Eric Dickmann (13:33):
I love that.
You know, just to that point,it's interesting because I work
with clients, I work withvendors all the time, and every
once in a while, I haven't heardfrom a vendor in a while, so I
want to reach out to them, just,you know, ping them.
So maybe I'll ask them aquestion.
And it's interesting, eventhough some of them have been
excellent to work with, theydon't respond because it's not a
request for business, right?
(13:54):
It's a question.
And it's like, you can't dothat.
You know, you have to quarter ofkeep those lines of
communication, you want to buildthat relationship, so when
business does come along,there's an easy opening to sort
of present that business.
Erik Newton (14:06):
Yeah.
You're top of mind.
But you're not only are you topof mind, you're top of heart.
You're so familiar and you'reentering into the friend zone.
Is sorta my style, like youknow, my ancestors are from the
Mediterranean, I have a realwarm engagement style.
And I think that serves well.
And customers like, everybodylikes attention, it's
(14:27):
validating.
And when you're communicatinglike that, you can find problems
so early, right?
The earlier you find theproblem, the smaller it is, the
less, you know, the less loss ofgoodwill that's happened cause
they haven't been frustrated fora long time with it.
Here's another idea aboutengagement.
Do an interview just like this,Eric.
You know, like I'm not saying todo a podcast, but to do a
(14:50):
qualitative interview, NPSscores are a little bit weird,
they're a little bit unnatural,they tend to go to the platform
user, not to the executive.
But, you know, you can do aquarterly business review, but
what about just, Hey, like,could I schedule 15 minutes of
time?
I want to hear how it's going, Iwant to hear what your
(15:11):
perspectives are, I want to hearchallenges.
You know, what can we do better?
What can I do better is sohumble.
There's nothing like that in theNPS.
NPS is this, you know, dry cutnumber.
But are you interviewing yourexecutives, you know, your
executive customers.
It's easy to do, it'squalitative research, right?
If you think about how we domarketing on the outbound side,
(15:35):
we love quantitative research,we see things in bulk in the
thousands.
But you know, if you do three orfour qualitative interviews,
you're going to get a differentand better read, a different
read certainly than thequantitative.
Eric Dickmann (15:49):
Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to
the podcast.
But first, are you ready togrow, scale, and take your
marketing to the next level?
If so, The Five Echelon Group'sVirtual CMO consulting service
may be a great fit for you.
We can help build a strategicmarketing plan for your business
and manage its execution,step-by-step.
(16:10):
We'll focus on areas like how toattract more leads.
How to create compellingmessaging that resonates with
your ideal customers.
How to strategically package andposition your products and
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How to increase lead conversion,improve your margins, and scale
your business.
To find out more about ourconsulting offerings and
schedule a consultation, go tofiveechelon.com and click on
(16:33):
Services.
Now back to the podcast.
Well, one of the things I reallylike about that is that we are
bombarded by surveys.
And I think for a lot of people,surveys have become an annoyance
rather than a real opportunityto provide feedback because
businesses have dropped the ballquite frankly, and they survey
their customers too much andpeople get the impression that
(16:55):
nothing is going to happen asthe result of this survey.
You're simply trying to makesome customer service agent feel
better, you know?
Because their performance reportwill be better because they
scored.
Erik Newton (17:04):
Homework, right, Eric?
Eric Dickmann (17:05):
Yeah, its homework again.
Erik Newton (17:06):
You're making me do homework.
I don't know what I get out ofthat.
Eric Dickmann (17:08):
Yeah.
If I know, I'm going to callthem next day.
Erik Newton (17:12):
NPS.
Eric Dickmann (17:13):
Yeah, right.
No, you do need, it.
But I mean, if I scored somebodylow on NPS, and then I got a
call the next day saying, Hey,we're really concerned, you
know, the score.
Can we talk about this in moredetail?
That would be meaningful to me.
If I score somebody low and Inever hear anything from the
company.
you just wonder what the pointwas.
Erik Newton (17:30):
Uh, Uh Yeah, I've definitely been in companies
where the bad scores scoresescalate only quickly because it
was a subscription business andyou do have executives falling
up.
Which is also on the verge ofself-serving, right?
They're following up because I'mmad, they're not following up
because they care.
They're not following up causethey want to help.
They're just following upbecause they think that they're
(17:50):
going to get fired.
Eric Dickmann (17:51):
That lagging.
indicator as you discussed,right?
Erik Newton (17:53):
lagging.
Yeah, I'm already, is it betternow?
Or like it's even moretransactional at that point.
It's better than nothing, butit's not texting you before
anything went bad and justmaking sure things are going
good.
So that's T and E track andengage.
Now next is Appreciate.
And we've already started totouch on this, but given the
(18:15):
gift of time, everybody's busy,everybody values their own time.
Are you reaching out?
Are you calling?
Are you communicating?
And you know, I miss going outto dinner.
Customer and cliententertainment is so important,
it's so part of my job to spendmoney and my shtick at my last
(18:36):
job was, I'm kind of a wineenthusiast.
So I would connect with peopleabout wine and I ask, what kind
of wine do you like?
And if they ever did me a favor,wrote me a review, I'd send them
a half case of the wine, youknow?
I mean it's a decent gift ifthey drink, but it's connected
to them and they know I askedand I listened.
(18:58):
That's you know, showing myappreciation.
But the other thing that needsto happen when you are giving
the gift of time is to bepresent.
That if you are going to be infront of customers, and you're
the kind of exec that's doingsome Siegel exec, you know, exec
support on an account and you'resorta checked out during and
(19:21):
they see it.
Yeah, that's terrible.
If you know like, God forbidyour phone buzzes or something
and you get distracted.
People notice, they feelunimportant if you divert your
attention from them.
I had actually a CEO at a priorcompany, and he was the busiest
guy I knew, hardest working guy.
(19:41):
I knew I never, I went out tolunch with him a number of times
as a customer.
And then later as a friend andcontact.
Never ever saw him look at hisphone during time with me,
Eric Dickmann (19:54):
He was fully present.
Erik Newton (19:54):
Never saw him do it.
Now, when I did go to work forhim and he did that all the
time.
He would look at his phoneduring the meetings and you kind
of realize, okay, I'm lost him abit here.
But he would never do it withcustomers.
He was really good at beingpresent.
That's a great skill, but it'snot just the mechanism of trying
to be appreciative, but likebeing there for them.
(20:18):
Another thing that kind ofsurprises me is like, if you ask
a customer for a reference, doyou send a reference?
Do you send a gift?
Oh yeah, reference is sovaluable.
You're working a$50,000 contractand.
they're putting their name andtheir brand and their logo
against your relationship.
(20:40):
And
Eric Dickmann (20:40):
It's a big deal.
Erik Newton (20:42):
And you know, people who are being
transactional, people who aren'tbeing appreciative, sometimes
busy salespeople.
Oh, was I supposed to send agift?
I'm like, what do you usuallysend?
I said, usually a bottle of wineor a bottle of booze, you figure
out what they like sometimes anAmazon gift card.
but she's like, I don't know howto do that, this prior company.
And I'm like, I'll take care ofit for you.
(21:03):
Just give me the email address,I got it.
And then you know, I'll come inand send it.
Those are a couple of those.
Any thoughts or comments?
Eric Dickmann (21:11):
No, that's great.
One of the things that I wasthinking about as you were
talking is that, you know welive in this magnificent online
world right now.
If you want to send somebody aletter, you can go to a site
like postable.com and they willsend a card on your behalf, you
know in something that lookslike handwriting.
You don't have to go to the postoffice, buy a stamp, stick it in
(21:32):
the mail.
There are ways to do this thatyou don't even have to leave
your desk.So many easy ways tobuy a simple gift, a gift card,
just a way to show thatappreciation.
And it's amazing how many peopledon't do that.
Erik Newton (21:45):
Yeah, They're not doing it and then the value.
Think about if somebody ishelping you close a sale, it's
an hour of executive timeeffectively, right?
Like your time, my time,whosever, and they're going to
go get on a call for 15 or 20minutes, but they're going to
prep too, right?
Like people don't like to justtumble into a call.
So an hour of exact times, acouple hundred bucks.
And you know, if you'reconsulting or contracting,
(22:06):
whatever, make sure yourecognize the value of their
time before you ask again.
Otherwise it might not work outas well.
And here's a couple of moreadvanced ones on appreciate,
make introductions.
So if you download your LinkedInnetwork, just so you can see it
all in a flat file, I've gotlike 2,600.
(22:29):
It's a lot to look at and youcan sort it a little bit who on
this list would benefit fromknowing somebody else on this
list?
Who would be friends?
Who works in the same city?
Maybe we know people in Idaho,people in Denver.
Maybe they're about the sameage, doing the same kind of
stuff.
Why wouldn't I introduce them?
Now, you're enriching theirlife.
you're showing your appreciationfor what they do for you, and
(22:50):
you're being a good friend.
I started doing like small likeround tables and office hours
kind of things, because the Zoomfatigue is getting, you know
like, webinars getting a littlebit tired with this much Zoom.
So you know, letting peopleinteract.
And then I could see there'sthree people in the healthcare
industry.
I'm like, Hey, you guys are inthe healthcare industry.
(23:11):
And you know, I can see youremail addresses.
Let me send this to the three ofyou.
Maybe you guys want to connect.
That's going the extra mile,that's being customer obsessed,
and these weren't evencustomers, these are just
prospects.
Not just prospects, but valuableprospects.
Eric Dickmann (23:25):
No.
I love that idea because itdoesn't always have to be
something tangible.
It can be that introductionwhich could be extremely
valuable.
But again, it's a great way toshow that you're thinking about
your customers, that youunderstand their interests, and
you understand why somebody elsemight be valuable for them to
meet.
Erik Newton (23:41):
Yeah, intellectually that's right.
But it shows that you care.
Like it's so differentiate, Imean like, you know, handwritten
notes is good, but you know,this is like a handwritten idea
of I could give you a new friendand I've heard so many times
that mathematically theconnections of your connections
are the most high potential partof your network.
(24:04):
So you personally know about 400or 500 people, but they each
know 400 or 500 people, and it'sin that second network that you
have a lot of reach out into thesocial graph.
So that's one.
Another one is giving leads.
Do you buy things from yourcustomers?
Do you like, well, we're goingto switch, we are going to
switch vendors so that we'regiving business where we get
(24:25):
business.
That's part of it.
And do you help them build theirbusiness?
You think about somebody elseyou might know that could use
their services.
Do you just make introductions?
Hey, I thought these guys mightyou know, need your consulting
or your product or your service.
So those are some of the
Eric Dickmann (24:40):
I love that.
Yeah.
Erik Newton (24:41):
appreciate, so we're in the T, the E, the A,
and now, we're going to the M,and that's mobilize.
And I got a couple more M's inthis mnemonic.
Eric Dickmann (24:52):
Perfect.
Okay.
Erik Newton (24:55):
Meet deadlines.
You can't miss deadlines.
Like the customers asking foryour commitment and they're
judging whether you hit it.
So you have to meet alldeadlines, a document, an email,
a response, and be clear aboutwhether you're talking about
this Thursday and tonight atmidnight or does Thursday and
tonight at 5:00 PM Eastern,you're East Coast and I'm West
(25:15):
Coast.
It's two, o'clock my time, youknow?
Meet that deadline, meet SLA..
SLA is service level agreement.
You know, your contract oftensays- I will do these things
within this amount of time orI'm effectively in breach of
contract.
You have to meet the SLS.
You gotta be conscious of them,your team has to read their
(25:35):
documents, you guys have torefresh yourself.
This is what we said we would doand this is how we be a good
teammate here with our customer.
We meet our SLS, make it right.
This one's pretty obvious, whencustomers are mad and they
escalate, something's got to getfixed.
I guess the other M here wouldbe, Make Good.
You know if something's broken,you give them something extra,
(25:58):
you give flexibility, you givemore product, more service.
But you have to make it rightfor people, you have to mobilize
your company.
And some of the great stories ofthe customer, the original
customer obsessed, Nordstrom,Southwest Airlines, people being
able to fix things, people atthe great hotels that are able
to just, they've got some budgetto take care of stuff.
(26:20):
Oh, you need batteries?
I'll send somebody to the storeto get them for you.
Oh, you need, if you need a newpair of socks or something like
that.
Giving people the ability tomake things right is, that was
the original, the Nordstrommodel.
Those are a couple of their
Eric Dickmann (26:38):
No, I think that that's really interesting
because I'm a huge believer inempowering employees to make
things right.
I also am a believer in that thecustomer is not always right.
There can be some difficultcustomers that are never
satisfied and you can turn yourorganization sort of inside out
trying to make them happy, andthey will never be happy.
(27:00):
And I think there does need tobe a point where you look at a
customer and say- Is this youknow, good time going for
something that Is never going towork out?
Yeah.
is this a good marriage?
That's exactly right.
Erik Newton (27:10):
Maybe we don't do it next year.
Eric Dickmann (27:12):
And you know, these are few and far between.
But I think the bigger issuethere is the empowerment.
And too often in anorganization, people are just
not empowered to make somethingright.
When you look at it and say, whynot?
You know, what is the hindranceto giving them the autonomy to
make this right?
Erik Newton (27:28):
Yeah, sort of a power and control model.
Eric Dickmann (27:32):
Yeah.
Right, exactly.
Erik Newton (27:33):
Decentralized thinking.
You know, the customer's notalways right, but they're
usually right because they'rethe customer, they have an
expectation, and most of theresponsibility is on us to align
to that expectation and to keepit right for them.
Eric Dickmann (27:49):
Or we set the expectations incorrectly?
Erik Newton (27:52):
Yeah.
That usually leads to problemsand those are some of the things
you got to iron out inonboarding.
And the first couple of times,there's escalations.
Usually, they'll give a coupleof mulligans.
You know, customers will giveyou some space to work out these
things and look at the contractand you know, have a few
meetings.
But after a while you gotta, yougotta do all these things to get
(28:13):
customer obsession right.
So that's reaction.
What about pre action?
You know, think about MinorityReport, if you know the movie, a
great concept of pre-crime.
Well, what about pre acting?
Just eliminate problems,eliminate friction that would be
frustrating if you were thecustomer, that would be
frustrating if you have a pickycustomer or whatever type you
(28:35):
have.
Preact to reduce these things sothat you're mobilizing your
organization so that there'sless tickets being opened, less
support tickets coming, ask forfeedback.
And then if all these things aregoing right, and you've done the
team, ask for reviews.
And this is a really humblingexperience.
The way I do this, at Milestonein a private company, as I said,
(28:57):
can you do me a favor?
You know, could you write areview about the product on G2
crowd or on Trust Radius, or.
Clutch.
You know, those search engineGoogle has reoriented the search
results to be biased towardsobjective review sites over
brands.
Google prefers those sitesbecause they are answering the
(29:19):
question, which is the best ofthis and that.
So you need to manage yourreputation, but there's no way
to game it.
You know, they check theLinkedIn of the people filling
it out.
They often check, make you provethat you're a product user and,
you know, send them a screenshotso forth.
So all of these things have tobe right.
And within Humility, you ask fora favor.
And you get a review, and it'son the internet for 10 or 20
(29:42):
years.
It lasts almost forever.
It's huge value.
So that is the TEAM acronym.
That's the structure of customerobsession.
I've got a couple of morestories and anecdotes, but.
Eric Dickmann (29:52):
No, No, I love that because you want something
that's easy to understand.
And I think it's a mindsetshift.
You know you have to move awayfrom sort of internal focus,
product focus, and start tothink more about putting
yourself in the shoes of yourcustomer.
And, you know, we all interactwith businesses every day and we
know what makes us happy, weknow what makes us fulfilled.
(30:13):
And it's amazing how often thatdoesn't translate into our work
life.
Erik Newton (30:17):
It It is amazing, you know?
We get, like you said, we justget the priorities kind of
wrong.
We prioritize internal stuffover external stuff.
That's not obsessed, that'sbeing bureaucratic, right?
That's the nature of bureaucracythat feels impersonal and
doesn't make us happy.
So this acronym is pretty easyto remember, but you want to be
(30:38):
part of their team.
I think we've all been inservice positions or we've been
on brand side or service sidewhen people say, well, we see
you as part of our team.
You know, we count you as ateam.
You had been invited sometimesto the employee, holiday
parties, stuff like that.
You really feel like an extendedpart of the team.
That's the goal is for that tobe true and real and authentic
(31:00):
that they see you as part of theteam.
But you gotta work at it.
You know, we've just reviewedabout 16 tactics that you can
use to get there.
You know, another constructthat's really useful is the
trusted advisor, which is it'sgetting it's a little bit dated
now, but in marketing, I oftentrain salespeople after they do
(31:23):
product training.
So they come out of producttraining and they talk product
and I'm like, yeah, that's notreally what the customer wants
to hear, they want to hearsolutions.
And if you're selling pots andpans, you're going door to door,
or let's say Cutco Knives,really good product, love the
product.
But somebody comes by andthey're like, buy a knife.
You could have this knife orthis knife, or this knife.
(31:45):
Like it's you know, they haven'tfigured out if I'm going to be
cutting a lot of meat or if I'ma fishermen, or if you know, I
need a tool for the backyard orwhatever it is, they don't
really know me yet.
But if you're a trusted advisor,it's really about the
discussion, like this kind of adiscussion where you and I are
exchanging ideas that help meknow you and you know, me.
(32:09):
I gave the example of I had atax problem a couple of years
ago, a complicated tax problem.
And I called up some attorneys,you know, One of them just
started consulting with me.
She says, I'll, I'll give yousome advice right now.
I've dealt with this before.
And this is how I would go atit.
She gave about 20 or 30 minutesof lawyering.
(32:30):
And I'd be like, well, I feelbetter.
I feel like this is going to,and she won the business, and
she did a great job.
Everything worked out good.
That's trusted advisor.
If she had said, I have apackage for this kind of real
estate tax issue, my fixedpackage, my product, A, B and C
is 3,000.
5000.
and I need a retainer.
(32:51):
She's like, you know, it's acouple hundred bucks an hour, it
was reasonable.
And she knew the people I wasdealing with.
That was great.
And the feeling of talking to atrusted advisor.
And when you think about it interms of accounting or legal
problems that are big, not likejust knives, pots, and pans,
then you get how you want to bewhen you're selling software.
(33:13):
Even if your widget is only acouple thousand bucks, it's
better if you communicate thatvalue to them in and make them
kind of believe in you and yourproduct, and that you
understand.
It goes back to this, all thethings we were talking about in
customer obsession, this works alot on in the sales cycle with
prospects.
Eric Dickmann (33:33):
Well, and I think, especially if you're in a
service industry.
Adding that value before yousort of aggressively go for the
sale can make such a differencein building up that trust.
And I've dealt with far too manyservice professionals that they
immediately want, you know tosign you up for, like you said,
a package or some sort of aservice.
It's like, Hey, I've just gotthis simple question, let's
build a little trust here.
And maybe there's a lot morebusiness that could come your
(33:55):
way.
I I'd like to take a dip my toein the water first before I go
there.
And some are very reluctant todo it.
Erik Newton (34:03):
Yeah, that's product led growth.
That's the freemium and service,right?
That they're giving you a tasteand you're seeing if it works,
and then if you guys likeworking together, I had a
plumber come out, and I thoughtI had figured out what the
problem was.
And so I was like, they came outand then they looked at it, I
(34:24):
showed them some pictures, andhe said, and then he said, you
know, it's like$6,000 to replacethat pipe.
I'm like, nevermind.
I'll figure something else out.
He goes, and here's a bill for$179 for coming out for the
estimate.
Okay.
You know what I did?
I went back to my aunt, I paidit cause I didn't, I hadn't
asked that they wouldn't dothat.
(34:44):
I went on Yelp and I toldeverybody, this company charges
$179 to come out, be careful.
That's going to be on theinternet forever.
Eric Dickmann (34:52):
Yes.
Yeah, the power of,
Erik Newton (34:55):
meIf they told me that, I would have said, I'm
okay.
I'm not sure I want to investthat yet on the estimate.
Go ahead.
Eric Dickmann (35:02):
Yeah, no, it was just, It's$179, right?
But that negative review, likeyou said, will last kind of
forever and was it really worth$179 for that guy to do that?
I think sometimes the trade offthat people are making is very
poor.
I had a recent example, myselfof an accountant who did a
terrible job for me.
And I kept saying, you know,you're a review based business.
(35:24):
This isn't good, you know?
Let's end this relationship on apositive note and they refused
to do it.
Erik Newton (35:29):
Threaten him or her into doing the right thing.
Right.
Eric Dickmann (35:32):
And they wouldn't do it.
They were so stubborn just to beright.
And yeah, so it cost them a badreview, which is unfortunate.
You know, Erik, I think we couldtalk about this stuff for hours.
This is really good.
I'm gonna make sure that at theend of this, we're going to
write a blog.
So we're going to list all thisstuff in the blog, but I would
love it if you could just sharewith people where they can find
out more about you, where theycan find out more about
(35:53):
Milestone, where's your spot onthe net?
Erik Newton (35:56):
Yeah, LinkedIn's a good place to start.
So linkedin/eriknewton, my workfor Milestone Internet and a lot
of resources and white papers Iput together are up in
milestoneinternet.com/resources.
You can have a look there.
You can reach me for anything.
I might be able to help you withat erik.n@milestoneinternet.com.
(36:19):
And if you come in on LinkedIn,please mention the podcast at
Eric and you know, we'll be sureto connect there.
Eric Dickmann (36:27):
Hey, that's great.
You know, this is fascinating.
Like I said, it's one of myfavorite topics to talk about.
There are a lot of bad examplesout there, but boy, when you see
good ones, it just makes yousmile, right?
Because you can have a lot ofsuccess if you really change
your mindset, you becomecustomer, you look at your
processes and say, how can we dothis better with the customer in
mind?
It can create some pretty bigdividends for your organization.
Erik Newton (36:50):
Absolutely.
Eric Dickmann (36:50):
Yeah.
Erik, thank you so much forbeing here.
Really enjoyed our conversationtoday.
Erik Newton (36:53):
Thank you, Eric.
Eric Dickmann (36:57):
Thank you for joining us on this episode of
The Virtual CMO podcast.
For more episodes, go tofiveechelon.com/podcast to
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