Posted on Monday, September 23, 2019

Creating Memorable Experiences with Manuel Christoffel of Woom Bikes

Episode 108

Manuel Christoffel is the (Interim) Chief Customer Officer at Woom Bikes where he manages marketing in customer service for all North America. Prior to joining Woom, Manuel has held global cross-functional customer success, program, marketing and brand strategy roles at ADP, Dell, American Express, Bazaarvoice, Hearsay Social, and his own consultancy business.

In this episode, Manuel explains what he means when he says huis declared goal is to deliver the best possible internal and external customer experience by combining EQ with IQ while cutting the red tape, the importance of realizing that the one purchasing your product isn’t always your true customer, why he believes there’s no such thing as “finding the right person” for your customer service team, why he doesn’t have penalties for team members who make mistakes, how he helps his CEO share their voice of influence, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Manuel Christoffel from Woom Bikes USA. He is the (Interim) Chief Customer Officer at Woom Bikes, managing marketing in customer service for all of North America. Prior to joining Woom, Manuel has held global cross-functional customer success, program, marketing and brand strategy roles at ADP, Dell, American Express, Bazaarvoice, Hearsay Social, and his own consultancy business.

His declared goal is to deliver the best possible internal and external customer experience by combining EQ with IQ while cutting the red tape. Now, we discussed ahead of time Manuel. I gave you a fair warning. I would like to know what in the world you mean by that. Please, please do tell us. Thank you for being here.

Manuel Christoffel: Well, of course, thank you for having me, Andrea. And yes, you did warn me with one minute heads up but as you said, I wrote it. So what do I mean by that? Really, to me there’s a difference. IQ to me does not necessarily mean that you went to an Ivy League school and they gave you a 4.0 GPA. It doesn’t mean people who go to an Ivy League and have a 4.0 are not highly intelligent.

But to me what comes down to is where’s your passion and are you intelligent about articulating that passion or pursuing that passion. Then taking the EQ to it where it’s not just about you and how you get the most out of this passion, but how do you really bond with your customers, whether internal or external, and how do you really make it a win-win along the way, right?

So, for us at Woom, I’ve basically and I’m the third iteration of our team here for customer service. I believe this is the winning team; phenomenal people, very driven, very passionate people, which is challenging for me because I come in and I’m just a little grumpy. I have a 4 year old and a 4 month old, so I’m not getting sleep. And my head of customer service, Sherry is just there. I’m not kidding you; she’s dancing at 8 o’clock in the morning with biggest smile ever and she’s like 20 miles one way to work before I even get there, right?

So, super, super passionate that will be done with the customer service team. I deliberately hired a mix of parents and non-parents and bike people, non bike people because to me it’s very important.

Andrea: Interesting.

Manuel Christoffel: I don’t want a bike specialist. My ultimate customer or consumer is a child. The people buying our product are parents; at least most of them are not hardcore cyclists. They might be bike enthusiasts. They might enjoy family bike rides.

Andrea: Can you just say that again?

Manuel Christoffel: I apologize. Yeah, what I was saying is a lot of our parents are, you know, they’re bike enthusiasts but they’re not hardcore cyclists, right? I live in Austin. Obviously, Lance Armstrong is here. There’s a lot of people that are a very hardcore, you know, race bike community, triathlon community, mountain bike community. So, we have all that.

But then there’s all these other parents, the normal people, and normal parents like myself that say “I have certain fond memories of my childhood riding a bike.” Falling on my face a couple of times until I learned is not one of them. But you know, all said and done, they were certain bonding moments with your parents when you achieved this monumental feet of balancing and propelling yourself forward. So bringing that passion to our brand is phenomenal.

And that’s why I said I don’t want, you know, semi-professional athletes only on my customer service team. I want people who are parents who have gone through some of these anxieties finding the right size, finding the right weight, even the right color, because the color makes a difference. You can buy the best, the nicest bike if it’s not the color the child wants _____. So there are all these aspects.

And so for me, it’s very important that I have an ecosystem of mutually, and I say, complimentary traits and skill sets and personalities. You know, when you start realizing, this is a very emotional purchase or there’s some anxiety around some inquiries around the bike, “Are they more technical in nature?” “Hey, maybe you should talk to my colleague.” “Are they, you know, more emotional in nature?” “You know what; you should talk to my colleague. He has three children.”

He literally started working here. He harassed us so much that I had to hire him you know. He’s phenomenal because almost every question we get in that regard he will say, “Well, you know, when I faced this decision, here’s what I thought about this. Here’s my decision making process. Does this sound anything like yours?” And you know, you have this bond that you can’t script it. You can’t pre anticipate of what is somebody going to ask and how do you, you know, maybe soothe this anxiety.

How do you justify the purchase price of our bikes, which in all fairness are not, you know, the most affordable in the market? They’re a little bit in the upscale side of things, but at the same time, what we hear time and time again from everybody across the board, our bikes are designed for children. They do make a difference.

The reason your 6-year-old girl does not really know how to brake is not because she’s not coordinated. She may not be able to reach the brake lever because she has a kid’s bike but these all shrunken down parts from a grownup bike. They’re not custom designed for a child’s hand at that age, right?

So, some of these attention to details that we put into bikes that ultimately turn people from, let’s say, potentially curious about the product in what they’ve heard into people that will take to social media and share their experiences that will send us pictures, videos, testimonials, you know, and triggered saying, “This is so phenomenal.” “We’re so happy.” “Thank you so much for putting the smile on our child’s face.” “Thank you so much for this experience.” And that, you know, it’s just a validation of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it is the right thing.

Andrea: Hmm. So, you mentioned that you get a variety of people who participate on your customer service team and that they readily refer each other for different causes or different problems that come up. I love that. How do you start the process where they begin to get to know each other well enough to know that this is the person that should handle this call or talk to this person about this particular problem? How do you develop that atmosphere besides, you know, finding the right people, like what’s the other process when it comes to getting to know each other?

Manuel Christoffel: Oh, absolutely. I mean, there is no such thing as finding the right person, right? You find somebody that I would say fits the mold about 80% and then 20% is you hope for the best, you pray for the best. And at the same time, you also hope that this person will take to your atmosphere, your style of management, and your company philosophy, right? And if all this works out, it’s great.

For us, when I started this entire team, it pretty much came on at the same time. I made it very clear, “Look, here’s X amount of _____ discretionary budget that you have to make a customer whole.” I do not want to nickel and dime somebody if a bell breaks or you know, if maybe a grip gets worn or whatever. If they take the time to call us, let us give them a new one, right?” And our people feel empowered doing that. And on the flip side, internally, what I keep preaching is essentially I want us to be reflective, not reflexive.

And by really hearing what a customer is saying, and this is something that’s very hard, our founder here, you know, Mathias, will tell you, he’s been in customer service. He’s meant the phones and he has a deep appreciation for what our people do because he self-admitted he said, “I can’t do it anymore because three seconds in, I know exactly what their problem is. But I also know they will talk for another two minutes and obviously it’s rude to not hear them out.”

So, just listening factually what are they saying and how are they saying it? The more rational person will say, “OK, rationally, I can answer this, but I’m sensing there’s some emotional triggers in this. There’s some anxiety about this.” And then it’s all about probing questions. So, we role play a little bit, but much of what we do, even after a call, you know, see they were transferred or end it, it’s the, “Hey, I heard you say this and that. Can you tell me more about this?”

It’s not necessarily that we police each other, but I want to foster this level of curiosity the way I hear something that “Hmm, I would’ve maybe said something different. Why did you do it this way?” “Oh,” because you know, you only hear the customer service side of things in the office. You don’t hear what the customer’s saying. And like, “Oh, OK, I understand. I’ve been through three bikes and weight is the most important feature.” Not necessarily the custom designed handles, not a different feature that we’re very proud of. It might really be the weight.

So, the entire conversation is around the weight or lack thereof with our product and our bike. And as we kind of have this, our knowledge base expands, and we have huddles every week where we say, “OK what was the best and the worst call you’ve had this week and why?”

Andrea: Love it.

Manuel Christoffel: So, this is sort of what we kind of, I don’t want to say we celebrate our losses because now we have some escalations, we have some unhappy customers. We cannot make all of them happy. And at times we feel it’s our fault, absolutely. But in kind of talking about that, what I see that the point we’re getting to is the team self regulates. I rarely have to step in and say, “Well, maybe you should try this or you should try this.” Because everybody feels comfortable enough to sort of admit their mistakes. They know I’m not going to, you know, publicly demean them or not really a penalty for making a mistake. My big ask is let’s learn from them and more importantly, do you now understand how this mistake came about?

Andrea: OK that is really, really important. I’m not sure how long have you been at Woom and was that already the way that it was?

Manuel Christoffel: So, I’ve been consulting to the CEO for about three and a half years and I’ve been here full time for this year. On the philosophy piece, it definitely always has been that way, but you know, we are essentially still as someone in startup mode. You know, a four and a half year old company started in a garage and moved to the third office, if we count the garage as an office, you know, in Austin growing nicely.

But it is very challenging because our CEO, a collegiate athlete, very, very passionate about the bike, about the product but really more, I’m going to say, from the bike geek point of view. So his passion doesn’t necessarily translates. So has the passion always existed? Absolutely; and our CEO will be the first person that will tell you, “If I’m not been passionate, I can only plead insanity as to why we are still here and why I didn’t give up along the way.” Because there’s definitely been some moments where you’re new to a market, you’re more expensive, nobody knows your brand and it’s difficult.

So, no matter how passionate you are about it, kind of seeing that basically your baby not being appreciated for what it is or being misunderstood, you know, it’s going to be very challenging. So, the passion has always been there. My job sort of is to say, “OK, how do we translate this?” Very similar to, you know, _____.

When I joined Amex early in 2007, I was a very hardcore visa credit card user. And I did not understand why people would pay for a charge card, because in my mind, the message that Amex had at a time was very much, “If you can’t afford this fee, maybe you just don’t make enough money.” That was my perception of the company because their brand messaging, their value messaging was not tailored to a personality like mine.

And going in and having some opportunity to speak with some marketing leaders and getting some feedback, they’ve heard some of that. But we’ve also gotten better as a company just educating and supporting our customers in understanding the value around some of these products.

So, fast forward, what I’ve seen is, it’s not about trying to hit your CEO over the head and saying you’re doing everything wrong, it’s about what matters and what is getting lost in translation and how do we add these pieces back in in a way that it resonates not just with the bicycle community.

And they are very passionate and they’re incredibly supportive. They spread the word. We would not be where we are without the bicycle community, no doubt. But you know, there are also other parents out there who don’t know the single pieces of a bike and why it matters that this is manufactured one way on machine the different way.

So, how do I translate this into a broad set of audience in a way where you understand there’s passion and there’s pride but you don’t feel necessarily like you walk into this high-end boutique and the salesperson will just never leave your aside. I don’t want that impression either. I want you to be able to form your own opinion. That is why we have the up-cycle program where you can return your bike when you buy a bigger one, or you’re a part of our up-cycle membership basically you get 40% of the initial purchase price credited towards the new purchase, the bigger bike that you’re buying.

It’s something where we say, “We do appreciate your initial purchase. We do understand we’re a little bit more expensive than some of these other brands out there. And we want to give you an incentive to stay with us. You know, we do want to acknowledge that that is why we rarely ever ask how did something break.”

But of course, if somebody you know, bought a bike a day ago and says this thing is totaled,” we will ask and say “You ran over it with your truck. I’m sorry. There’s not much I can do. I may send you a shirt just to cheer you up, absolutely but I can’t send you a new bike.” But generally, _____, like what does this mean functionally? This means, you know, we’re not going to nickel and dime our customers. This means now we will really hear them out and if we need to transfer them, not because we’re tired of them, but because we sense that somebody else can support them in a more meaningful way.

Andrea: OK, so you have so much here that we can dive into and I have some questions based on what you were just talking about because there’s so much here. And one of the things that came up here kind of more towards the end of what you were saying was that you really help the CEO kind of apply and act on their vision as it applies to customer service.

Manuel Christoffel: Right.

Andrea: Our company is called Voice of Influence, the podcast that we’re on right now is called Voice of Influence and what you said was that, you know, there are times when you have to be a voice of influence with the CEO in order to help them to translate their vision into something that’s going to make a difference for the customer. So, do you have any specific ideas about what is one of the best ways to communicate that to the CEO themselves?

Manuel Christoffel: It really depends on the personality of the CEO and the relationship that you’re able to establish and the authority that you kind of bring to the table. In my case, the company is extremely fortunate; our CEO does not have what I call “founder syndrome.” He does not have an ego. You could be an intern on your first day and literally radically change an aspect of the business just by asking one question because it just doesn’t make sense to you. In some companies I’ve worked at, you would have probably been scolded for even daring to speak up on day one, let alone talk to the CEO.

Andrea: Right, right. So people have a voice?

Manuel Christoffel: People have a voice, and because he’s always sort of known that it takes a village to build a brand, right? And it takes a community to grow a brand and really, you know, become a brand even in the first place. So, for him, it’s all about how do all these individual pieces, all these things he wants to accomplish, how do we kind of prioritize them? And also, you know, we’re growing quite a bit.

So, we get inundated or he gets inundated with so many increases, so many proposals, so many suggestions, so many tools, and so many partnerships. I’ll say “OK, let’s ignore all that for a second, either you will read through all this tonight or I will do this or somebody else will do it. What matters to you? What are we doing this quarter or this year? Or what’s the single biggest thing you just wish we could change? Then let’s see who can help us on this journey whether that’s internally like hiring the right people, growing the right people.”

It’s important to me that when somebody comes and works at this company, especially on my teams, since I have the most influence over them, that they are more marketable and more knowledgeable than they were before they came to us. Obviously, I don’t want people to leave, but I understand, you know, opportunities are out there and some people, you know, may just want to move to a different city. They want to live by the beach. So, I never want to stop anybody, but I will make sure that we’ve also made your career more noteworthy and meaningful while you were here.

Andrea: So that’s connected to your purpose, it sounds like. You feel that you can make a difference in their lives and so that’s something that’s going to come out in the way that you lead.

Manuel Christoffel: Definitely, I do feel that way, but I have almost unlimited patience and support in pursuing that from our CEO because he does it for you.

Andrea: Yes. That is awesome.

Manuel Christoffel: He understands. You know, as I said he’s a very intelligent person. He’s a very accomplished person. He understands that not everybody is here for the same reason he is here, but it’s his baby. It’s his company, right? So he can’t expect it. So what he’s saying is how can we make this meaningful and at the same time, how can we make this, for lack of better term, how we can make this as a partnership. It’s not an employment.

There are two or three very, very hard rules that I pursue. Aside from that, and these are predominantly related to like, you know, HR and just don’t do silly things. Let’s be PC here, right? But aside from that, you can revamp on almost everything. If there is potential, there’s promise. And we do not want to be that boss that hindered your career, that CEO that just did not even give you a voice.

We want to be, at times, that people that kind of save you from yourself internally. I’ve had that in my career many times when a boss said, “You know, I know you’re really angry, just go take a walk. Don’t say what you want to say right now, just go take a walk.” And it takes some time to realize you just saved me from myself.

Andrea: Yes. That’s awesome.

Manuel Christoffel: So, I kind of want to be that and, you know, some people are very receptive to this, obviously others are not. But what’s just really important for us, we know if we jive, we’ll work well together. We support each other, you know, no matter really what that takes. Our customer service team, at times, comes and helps build bikes. At times, some of our technicians on the up-cycle program come and help mend the phone lines if we have incredible demand.

And there is not really like this, “Oh, I have to go out there and it’s kind of warm and I have to build the bike” and “Uh, I just really want to answer phones.” It’s the “OK, maybe there’s a suboptimal,” if they even think that. But it’s much more, “Hey, you know, let’s just get this going what needs to happen. What do we need to do?”

So that’s what I look for in people. I don’t want people who want a job. I’m looking for people that want a career. I think that’s already a big distinction. And then I very much ask them, “Hey, look, what can I expect from you and what are some things I should look out for?” And some of that stuff I’m hearing, at times, I have heard of people that we have hired, I didn’t love so much, but you got to appreciate the honesty.

Andrea: Yeah, they admitted it.

Manuel Christoffel: Exactly. You’d have to admit it. I mean, you know, I know right before a job interview, “I’m gonna Google this company. I’m gonna Google all the answers. I’m gonna go at Glassdoor. I’m gonna know how I’m gonna be 85% perfect in all my answers.” So, somebody really breaking script and being honest, like this is a phenomenal starting point because that means I can be honest with you and you’re going to tell me whether this resonates or not.

Andrea: And…

Manuel Christoffel: Sorry, go ahead.

Andrea: No, I apologize. Keep going.

Manuel Christoffel: No, no, by all means.

Andrea: Well, I was just going to say, and they’re not going to feel shame. You have created a culture where it’s not about shame. There’s not this penalty for making mistakes, like you mentioned before, and so people can more freely share their voice. They can more freely be authentic and make mistakes but go for it more too.

Manuel Christoffel: Absolutely. You’ll pursue your passion and if you work something, you know, this is an ongoing thing that we’re still working on, at times, especially when you go in like chat on social media. When you get into like, you know, comments you want to respond, you try to be somewhat brief. You don’t want to write a book because, you know, people will just not read a book but you do want to address the comment. So, as you kind of track it that down, at times we some, I want to say, less fortunate phrasings and whatnot.

So, I know, we’ve come across and like “hey” and usually it’s like, “Oh, that last thing. Yeah, I was struggling with this too. I really wanted to say this but you know, we’re trying to keep this below X amount of lines, so that’s why I chose this.” “You know what, make it two lines longer. It’s OK, it’s just really is the better thing.” But we’re getting into such a groove to where it’s not this, “Oh my God, you’re just tearing me down and I can’t do anything perfectly.”

We’re almost in sync already but we’re still kind of, you know, feeling each other out a little bit. Where is that perfect balance of what you said, keep it below X sentences. I’m trying to do that. In my mind though, it would have taken another sentence or two. So we’re compromising, “You know what, use what I’m saying as a guideline.” It means don’t triple the amount of sentences, but if in doubt, if it’s between potentially unfortunate phrasing or really saying what you want to say, say what you really want to say.

Andrea: Hmm that’s really empowering for them too.

Manuel Christoffel: Honestly, it helps me because it helps me understand how they take what they are good at. Some people, on our customer service team, are phenomenal with local customers and walk ins. They’re passionate about it. They really love it and others say rightfully. We know you have a local sales department, but I really was helping our people predominantly under phone or email, like more traditional customer service supports type of role.

So, “OK, where are our personalities?” What do you prefer doing?” I want everybody to be well versed, but it doesn’t mean we can’t try to specialize down a little bit and say, “OK, do we have the bandwidth for, you know, my person who really loves talking with customers and interact with children and share his story about his children and all these other things?” Yeah. If in doubt, I want that person. I want him to speak to our customers. I want him to spend some time with them. And even if they don’t buy a bike, he’s just had a really good time at work giving thoughts about what he’s passionate about, sharing things about his family life, and about his children in our customers.

Even if they don’t buy anything, you know. Again, they don’t have this boutique experience, they’ll come in “What bike do you want? What size? What’s your credit card? Oh, you want to try, what do you mean you undecided? Why? You didn’t do your research?” And that’s the experience that some customers have with some other brands, or you know, just generally when it comes to that type of purchase.

So, we really want to make sure that we do a very good job educating our customers upfront, sharing some of the pride and the passion that we have and being really empathetic and listening to their needs and then kind of making that decision, “OK, you very clearly know your way around bikes and you have a concern about this and that.” We may not even have the right person in customer service, “You know what I have a bike technician that you would really love talking to. Do you mind holding, either you mind holding for a minute or can he call you back within the next five minutes?”

Andrea: That’s got to be like really impactful.

Manuel Christoffel: It makes a difference and this was, you know, my philosophy. I personally would rather exchange 15 emails than pick up the phone once and call customer service. So then the worst thing you can do to me is put me on hold for 10 minutes. So, if you tell me I’m going to call you back within 10 minutes and you call me back into three, by default, there’s almost nothing you can do to upset me at this point.

Andrea: Right? And _____ somebody else and you’re like breaking scripts I can tell. You’re breaking script with the customer.

Manuel Christoffel: It’s the red tape, right? We’re a call center; rep just does not have the authority. I mean they may want to say, “You know what, Pete over there knows so much more about the ins and outs of your fiber line, but unfortunately I can either transfer you to a supervisor if you really want to escalate or you have to hang up and call back.” So, a lot of people in his industry, in customer service don’t have the freedom to kind of say, you know, “May I please transfer you to one of my peers who can help you a lot more.” Or you know, “Hey, you seems really, really unhappy.” And then you got up, “Hey, look, this person is really unhappy. I honestly think they wanna feel heard, you have a good title; if you want to talk to them.” And, you know, it tends to work.

Again, we can’t make everybody happy. We make mistakes, we learn from them, myself included. But to me, what’s important fundamentally is the attitude and really just reiterating, “It’s OK to not be perfect, but let’s be honest along the way.” That to me is important and when we hear, “Hey look, now there’s still some more red tape, or I still don’t have this. I don’t have this.” “Hey, we don’t really know what’s going on in the company.” Our CEO went to the extreme, he set up 15 minute one-on-one every single month with every employee at his company.

And I can tell you, he doesn’t really have all that much free time. He said “If they really don’t know, I could do a town hall, but guess what, some people can’t make it. Some people are stuck on the phone. I will talk to every single person and we’re gonna do this, you know, every month.” For the time being, _____ because it’s not sustainable, right? But it’s the “You’ve spoken, I’ve heard you.” It’s not that “Well, let’s send it to an assistant who then tries to schedule a calendar.” And “Who are you, you have been here two months and you want to FaceTime with the boss?”

Now, we have all this in companies that are a lot smaller than us. And you know, we’re not all that big word, you know, on a good day we’re 50 people in the US. So, it’s not that we’re all that big, but I’ve been at smaller companies and you just did not get FaceTime with, you know, you skip-level, let alone the CEO. So that to me is just very important that really everybody here feels like they have a voice and more importantly they have an opinion, we hear it.

Sometimes it’s, you know, this would be perfect. I have a wish list of tools and infrastructure and people for that matter, “Hey, if I do my job right in three to four years, I’m gonna get all of that. For the time being, well, here’s why you can’t have it, but this is what you can have. What can you do with this?” And that to me, again, is more powerful than just saying no.

Andrea: Yeah. Wow, that’s really, really great. I love this. I love that you and your company are focused so much on helping people to have a voice and utilizing their voice to really make your company better and make your customer service better. And that is a clearly making a difference in the way that your customers experience your brand, so congratulations on that because that’s a huge feat.

Manuel Christoffel: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Andrea: So, Manuel, if people are interested in Woom Bikes or interested in you at all, where should they connect with you or could they?

Manuel Christoffel: Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, I’m a really, really big fan of LinkedIn, although I will say, I sadly do not know every single person in my LinkedIn profile. But you know, that’s Manuel Christoffel on LinkedIn. My Twitter is a little bit harder because that’s manuel_c, apparently there’s another manuel_c out there.

Andrea: We will link to those on the show notes so that people can find you. Go ahead.

Manuel Christoffel: No, thank you. But, absolutely, I mean it’s been a phenomenal journey. It’s a great company. I love talking to people. I like learning from people because what we’re seeing, you know, a lot of the best bits of, you know, I’m going to say food for thought we’ve received from some people, not necessarily in the marketing industry or the customer service industry or even the bike industry. It’s just people who, you know, have lived a life who say, “Well, you know, when I have to scale something or when I had this problem or when I manage people, here’s kind of what I do.”

Those kinds of tips that’s what I’m saying networking is so incredibly underrated. A lot of people only network when they need a new job or they need a reference or an introduction or something. To me, it’s kind of like you kind of pay it forward its service leadership and the networking space in a sense, because one of these days you hope karma is a real thing and somebody else will return the favor. But for the time being at the very least, let me meet some interesting people. And even if we have some opposing views or, you know, tell me really why you think everything we do is so fundamentally wrong.

I’m not saying I’m going to convince you, but at the very least it’s going to potentially help me maybe reevaluate some of the things we do and say maybe we should fine tune this because we will grow and we might hit this particular problem down the road, how can we kind of preempt? And that that to me is very important.

And networking is great. Meeting new people is phenomenal, you know, going to conferences kind of speaking, hearing opposing views. And hopefully, in the process getting some more people to come visit the website, take a look at our bikes and become part of our journey.

Andrea: Hmm. That’s great. Well, thank you so much Manuel. Thank you for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

Manuel Christoffel: Thank you, Andrea. I look forward to seeing you in Chicago.

Andrea: Yes!

Posted on Monday, September 16, 2019

Guiding a Team to Take Your Customer’s Perspective with Tim Bay

Episode 107

Tim Bay is the Head of Digital Marketing at Fellowes Brands where he is responsible for building comprehensive strategies and programs to drive greater brand awareness, increased engagement, and profitable growth via digital channels. Before joining Fellowes, Tim had accumulated 20+ years of B2C and B2B digital marketing leadership experiences in roles such as Vice President of Digital Marketing at Wilton Brands and Co-Founder of Shay Digital, an internet marketing consultancy where he developed and executed online strategies for a wide breadth of organizations. In this episode, Tim discusses what he does in his current role, the common challenges he sees between digital marketing agencies and their clients, the balance between automation and utilizing actual people, the role empathy plays in how you market to your consumers, how to integrate empathy in all aspects of your business, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with Tim Bay. Tim is currently Head of Digital Marketing at Fellowes Brands, which he’ll explain in a minute, where he is responsible for building comprehensive strategies and programs to drive greater brand awareness, increased engagement and profitable growth via digital channels. Before joining Fellowes, he had accumulated 20+ years of B2C and B2B digital marketing leadership experiences in roles such as vice president of Digital Marketing at Wilton Brands and co-founder of Shay Digital, an internet marketing consultancy where he developed and executed online strategies for a wide breadth of organizations, Gatorade, Ty, etc.

Andrea: So, Tim, we’re thrilled to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Tim Bay: I’m excited to be here. Thank you.

Andrea: Well, Tim is also speaking at a conference that I’m also speaking at the end of September, the Digital Experience Summit in Chicago. So, Tim, let’s start with what do you do as head of digital marketing at Fellowes Brands?

Tim Bay: So, I would say at the highest level, it’s looking at how we can leverage digi-channels. That could be website. It could be social. It could be email to achieve our business objectives. You know, these objectives are how do we enhance brand awareness, how do we drive product awareness, and ultimately how do we convert to sales? So, that’s sort of from the business side. You know, thinking about it from a consumer first perspective is what can we do to help people along their journey? And we sell products, everything from shredders to storage boxes, to sit stand desks, to chairs, or to laminators. How can we help people find what they want to find? How can we make it easiest for them to get what they need, to get when they want to get it, and how they want to get it?

Andrea: Great! So, when it comes to digital marketing, you know, you being the head of it, how did you get to that point, like what was sort of the journey that you’ve taken because you mentioned in your bio that you also had a consultancy for awhile? So, we were talking beforehand that it was really interesting that you have been on both sides of agency and client in terms of, you know, this relationship between agency and clients. So, I guess I’m just wondering what has been that path for you?

Tim Bay: So, I actually started out when I was an undergraduate as finance major and accounting minor, and I thought I was going to be a stock analyst or stock researcher at some point. I went back to get my masters and I took my first marketing class for my masters and just fell in love with marketing. And then what led me to digital was I think a little bit of the right brain and left brain and the ability to get the immediate feedback and analyze, you know, what’s working, what’s not working given that sort of real time feedback in terms of what we can do to be more effective. And then from a digital marketing perspective, you know, as you mentioned over the course of my career, I have been on both the client side and the agency side. And largely that depends on where I saw some great opportunities and the ability to learn. And so I like having been on both sides because I think it made me better on the agency side to be able to empathize with the plight of the client and to understand what it’s like to work in an organization. And sometimes there are challenges that you face. And then on the client side, understanding sort of how agencies work and how I can be a better partner from my client perspective, but also understand a little bit of the nuances of agency and helping me in terms of the clients I get the most out of that relationship. I can always feel like, you know, the best relationship, the best partnership is one where it’s mutually beneficial. So, I do feel like being on both sides sort of gives a perspective that allows you to get not only more out of it from your side, but also help be a better partner.

Andrea: Do you think that there are any common mistakes that you’ve noticed, maybe you’ve helped mitigate them so that they don’t happen that when it comes to that relationship between client and agency, when they’re trying to figure out plans and execute plans and all that sort of thing, have you noticed any particular mistakes that kind of pop up quite frequently?

Tim Bay: Yeah. I think the biggest challenge from the client side is believing that you can just offload strategy to an agency and the fact it’s the best relationships and I feel like this from the agency side as well. The best relationships are our partnership and you have to give the right amount of time, you have to be fully vested, you have to be transparent. The more information, the more time that you can spend with your agency, the better ultimately they will be able to be. And I think the other thing too is, and this goes from both sides, is really being honest about what you need in a relationship and what you need in a partnership and what success looks like. Because I think too often you get a few months in and you just realize that things are operating as effectively as you’d like and that comes back sometimes to expectations in terms of how much time, from the agency perspective, they have to spend to manage the account, some of the challenges they might be facing in terms of gaining information or deadlines or things like that. And so I think, you know, going in understanding what is needed from both sides and being committed to doing that and having those conversations up front really helps.

Andrea: So, making sure that the relationship is structured in a way that is going to allow for the time and the energy that needs to be spent in order to establish your goals and get everything in place before you even begin so that you can keep referring back to it?

Tim Bay: Exactly, exactly. And I think part of it too is, you know, you mentioned strategy. Another challenge is if I as the brand can’t communicate a strategy, I can’t expect my agency to actually execute against that strategy effectively. And I think sometimes recognizing that there needs to be some work done first from a strategy perspective before you can engage in agency and in a very effective way. And again, that goes back to just really understanding what you need to do from your perspective to partner successfully with an agency.

Andrea: OK, so at the conference we’re talking about managing and optimizing digital customer experience to drive greater loyalty and profit, and one of the things that I feel like is super important in the managing and optimizing of the experience is the digital piece of, you know, automation and that sort of thing, but then also the people side of things. So, for you, when you’re working at Fellowes or when you’ve worked with other clients in the past, how much energy and effort goes into each side of that equation, the people side versus the automated side?

Tim Bay: I still think the greatest asset that any organization can have is its people. As much as I get excited as a marketer about things like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, you know, there’s nothing that replaces a great team of people. And that’s not just from a customer service perspective but it’s also from sort of thinking proactively about how to create that best customer journey. You have to think about the customer first. You have to be proactive in terms of understanding what is it they want and meet their needs before you can sort of, you know, get them to give you what you want in a way. And so, I think the technology has to work hand in hand with people. I don’t think you can certainly, not anytime soon, I imagine a situation where you feel like whatever technology solution you have is going to be as effective in a lot of areas as just our ability to communicate, interact, engage, and strategically think through issues. Now, there are things that obviously technology can do better than us as humans, right? Things like, you know, quick computing and things like, I think personalization. But at the end of the day, you know, I think people want to feel from a customer service perspective, people want to feel like there’s somebody there on the other end that is helping them out and listen to them and understand the nuances of human language. And I think on the forefront it’s being able to, you know, people want to feel like that experience that we’re providing to them via a website, for example, was created with an understanding of what their challenges are. And that is something that, right now, the best way to do that is with really creative and smart people.

Andrea: Hmm. So, when it comes to giving them a good experience from the outset and would you say, it generally starts out with the website and that sort of thing, right?

Tim Bay: Right.

Andrea: So, you’re going to make sure that the websites optimal for people and then they’re going to encounter people. And so, how do you decide as a company? What is the line that kind of crosses into the actual human experience? So what needs to be automated and what needs to be human to human?

Tim Bay: Well, I think that is always a bit of a challenge, because you want to provide the best experience possible, right? Almost like a customized, you know, white glove treatment, but then you have the realities of just staffing and maybe 24 hours and things like that. So, for us, yeah, I think, we’ve always tried to think about is how do we find that right balance. And also recognizing that in today’s world, there are some times that people, you know, they’d rather chat versus call a phone, and sometimes, they want to sort of do self service. And so, I think for us, it’s looking at the situation. It’s looking at what the product or service is and saying based on that, what are the types of help that people are going to need. If it’s, you know, something very basic, they may want to know dimensions or they may want to know a specific product feature. If it’s something that’s maybe more complex or even more expensive, they may want to be able to talk to somebody and be able to ask that person questions. So, in some cases a really good FAQ, a really good _____ on the page, a chatbot, or even a chat that connects to a human might be we think good enough to provide that direct level of service. But sometimes it’s more than that and that’s part of where I think we have to look at the situation and think about it from the perspective of the consumer, you know, what is that thought process, what is that decision tree looked like for her? And at what point might she get stuck and do we feel like no matter what tactic is we’re doing enough to help her get unstuck from a situation that she’s at?

Andrea: So, I love how much you’re talking about getting her perspective and coming from her perspective. What are some of the best ways to actually figure out what her perspective is? How do you actually take her perspective? Do you ask, do you imagine, or do you use a committee to talk about it? What is the process that you guys go through?

Tim Bay: I think to start off with, there’s got to be a mindset. It’s a mindset, and one of my favorite words in marketing beyond that is empathy. And you have to put yourself in a situation of who that consumer is, so one is understanding who is the consumer. And then, you know, we’ve done a lot throughout my career in lots of places, we’re doing this at Fellowes about building a persona, because the danger is you always look at your customer as yourself. I think, especially in organizations, you know, let’s take for example an engineer talking about the product is very different than a consumer buying the product, right? And so, we very much look at who is our consumer and let’s put ourselves in her situation, understand what’s driving her motivations, what is she looking and what concerns does she have. And part of that is just if you build that persona out and you put yourself in that perspective, you can go very far in terms of understanding that person, but then we supplement that with things like focus groups. It could be any type of research that you can do, maybe it’s first party, maybe it’s third party to sort of build out that understanding. And then of course you have an idea, you build something out, you feel like you’ve done everything you can but you need to test that out. And then you continue to listen after you roll something out to see, are they experiencing what we expect them to be? So, I think it, ultimately, has to be a commitment too. You’re always thinking about that consumer and always thinking about who that person is. It’s not necessarily you, in most cases it’s not thinking about everything through that lens of her. And I think if you do that, it’s always keeping you on the right path in terms of whatever you need to do to make sure that you’re providing the best experience for her.

Andrea: Do you find that the people that do this with you, that work together with you to build this empathy and build the persona, does this translate into better relationships in general with them because they’re able to do that? Because this is not something that people do well in general.

Tim Bay: You know, one of the things that I think that’s really important and whether if you’re talking about ecommerce, digital marketing, management, personal relationships, empathy and trust. So, from a team perspective, one of the things that has always been challenging in terms of building a team is building that level of trust, especially as you’re bringing new people together or asking people to do things that they haven’t done before. And so, one of the byproducts of what you just said is that even from a team perspective, you’re sort of learning to put yourself in somebody else’s position. And that works whether or not you’re talking about website visitor or you’re having a conversation with a teammate about creative or a wire frame, a copy or content. And so, I do think that overtime it does help not just in terms of what you’re trying to do with that particular customer journey but overall.

Andrea: Yeah, I would think so. It’s interesting to me this connection between what we’re trying to accomplish in business and selling and having actual relationships, because we’re sort of taking the idea of having a relationship and taking it to a completely different level when it comes to business. And I think businesses are getting more and more aware and becoming more and more aware and more attuned to the idea of, “No, this really needs to be a relationship with the customer not just, you know, a transaction.”

Tim Bay: Absolutely. You know, I love and I’m passionate about and most of my times thinking about the digital world, from a digital marketing perspective. But when we talk about a customer journey, I always think about that website like a store, if somebody were to walk into a store, what would you want that experience? How would you greet that? What would be the first thing that you say to them? How would you help them navigate the store? If they wanted to talk to you then how would enable that? If they wanted to browse and if they’re a tech person and want to do a little bit of researching, exploring on their own, how would you make that really efficient for them? And I think the other point that you talked about is, again, even though it’s a digital relationship, it’s still relationship. And I think any business, whether you’re selling shredders or you’re selling consulting services, you really do want that to be a long-term relationship. And just from a practical perspective, much easier, much more efficient to engage with your current community of folks that already know you and believe in you and like you than going out and finding new people. So, thinking about anything that we can think about from a digital perspective as a relationship and something that we’re trying to, and this is important for our brand at Fellowes because of what our brand stands for, we want that to translate into the digital world. And so even though it’s a digital relationship or a part of it maybe, we always still think about it as you’re still connecting. It’s just the medium that you’re doing it is different than if you were in person.

Andrea: Yeah. I love the analogy of the website being like a store and how you’d welcome them and all that sort of thing. I think that’s really good. So, when you said that Fellowes has, how did you put that, what you’re trying to be about or what you’re trying to communicate as a brand, what is the communication that you’re trying to communicate as a brand?

Timothy Bay: Well, I think part of our DNA, and so Fellowes has been around for 101 years. It is a family owned and run business. John Fellowes who is our current CEO is a fourth generation. And, you know, one of the things that John has mentioned and he has said this in a couple of different settings is he was told by his dad who’s third generation that they are there to serve the business, not the business or the family and part of our DNA is helping people. We’re very much about workplace wellness, how can we make people feel better? How can we make them work better? It’s really part of sort of our tagline. And so that can’t just be, you know, tagline or slogan but that you have to live it. So, going back to that sort of relationship part, we have to think about “Are we providing value to the consumer?” “Are we giving her the right information?” I mean, obviously from a product perspective, we’re thinking about that in terms of “Are we making it easier for her to do better?” “Are we ultimately make her feel better as part of that experience?” And if that’s part of your DNA, you think about that in every single thing that you do, whether it’s part of your feature set or product, it’s building a website, it’s an email communication, or it’s something on social. And so again, going back to, you know, as a company, when you have this notion of what your values are and what’s your purpose is, it needs to permeate every single thing that you do, including digital marketing.

Andrea: Oh yeah, that’s really, really seems to be important. And I’m curious as to how that plays out. So, when you’re talking about your DNA, the values, the purpose and all that, when you’re needing to build out these different things whether it be product, the service, the website or whatever, like practically speaking, do you look at your DNA first and say, “OK, how can we make sure it does that?” Or is it just something that’s sort of in the back of your mind all the time? Practically speaking, how does that workout for how to integrate that?

Tim Bay: So I think, it’s a bit of both. It is always present at the back of our mind, but we can’t forget to explicitly remind yourself of that. I just walked through with the team recently, a playbook that I call on, you know, how we’re thinking about email marketing. And playbook is basically, here’s the things that we think we need to be doing to do the best that we can in a particular channel or particular tactic. That playbook starts with a reminder of the things that we need to be thinking about from that sort of DNA perspective, thinking about the customer first, thinking about how we’re communicating that in everything that we do, whether it’s a LinkedIn post or an email campaign or a banner. And of course there’s always some sort of spectrum in terms of how much you can do that. You can do a lot more with a blog post than you can with a web banner. But I think, again, you want to always be there to remind yourself consistently that you got to be thinking about _____ that’s always in the back of your mind.

Andrea: Hmm, so you integrate that into the playbook itself too.

Tim Bay: Absolutely. You know, one of the things I’ve learned throughout my career is that it’s really difficult to over communicate something. You know, 99 percent of the time, it’s the under communication that takes a lot of time and a lot of enforcement and reinforcement of something before it becomes part of our sort of daily nature and habit. And in a way, you want to always have a top of mind. It takes a lot to do that and it’s really difficult to over communicate.

Andrea: Yeah, yeah. That’s so good. Tim, I can’t believe it’s already about time to wrap up. But when, you know, people are looking to be a voice of influence and when it comes to either on a team, whether that be on an agency or an a client side, whether it be because we’re thinking about our client or our particular customer or our relationships, do you have something that you would like to leave with the listener in terms of a tip or a strategy or one last thought?

Tim Bay: I think that all of us have something to offer and have a unique perspective. And, you know, I think as managers, as leaders, we want to empower folks, we should also feel just a natural empowerment to give our point of view, you know, to recognize that everybody has a different perspectives. And when we talk about diversity of opinion, you know, it’s so important. And so, I think when you talk about voice of influence is, you know, I think we have to on one hand, you know, _____ sometimes and trust a little bit that our opinion matters. And then, I think, again, as leaders we have to enforce and reinforce that we want to have folks voice. We want to have that level of trust and comfort there because, you know, two smart people are always going to come up with a better solution than one person. And we have to create that environment that facilitates folks having comfort and talking about bringing their perspective and bringing different ideas. And that’s something that has to be nurtured. You just can’t say it’s going to happen. It’s something that you have to continually tend to like you would, a flower garden. If you don’t, it runs over with weeds and eventually the flowers die. I can’t overemphasize how important that to me in terms of building good teams and making sure that people feel comfortable with those works of different ideas and opinions.

Andrea: So good, so good. Thank you, Tim. How can people find Fellowes or find you?

Tim Bay: They can find Fellowes at fellowes.com and then, you know, you can see our social channels from there and they can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. So, I’m happy to talk to anybody at any point in time. I always love talking to folks who are interested in talking about anything from customer journeys to culture, to digital marketing. I love talking to people.

Andrea: Awesome! Thank you so much for doing that and for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners, and we’ll be sure to link all of the things that you mentioned here in the show notes.

Tim Bay: Great! Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it, Andrea!

Posted on Monday, September 9, 2019

Become the Person You Want To Be with David Neagle

Episode 106

David Neagle is the founder of the multimillion-dollar global coaching company, Life Is Now, Inc. David helps thousands of entrepreneurs, experts, and self-employed professionals gain confidence and find the right mindset to increase their revenue, turning their endeavors into seven and eight-figure ventures. He is also the author of Millions Within and the host of the Successful Mind podcast. In this episode, David talks about the near-death experience that inspired the name of his company, why having a successful mind should matter to someone who wants to have a voice of influence, how a person can change things when they feel stuck, the power of deciding you’re no longer going to tolerate what your mind tells you about things you don’t want to change or do, why people find it difficult to have conversations about money, why it’s important to pursue making more money on their own, his unconventional perspective of sales, the two main things people need to be clear on in order to make big changes, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, we have David Neagle on the line with us, and I’m really looking forward to this. He is the founder of the multimillion-dollar global coaching company, Life Is Now, Inc. Life is now, not later apparently. Maybe you can tell us a little about that in a second, David. He helps thousands of entrepreneurs, experts and self-employed professionals gain the confidence, find the right mindset to increase their revenue, turning their endeavors into seven- and eight- figure ventures. He is the author of Millions Within and the host of the Successful Mind podcast.

Andrea: David, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

David Neagle: Thank you Andrea. Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Andrea: And so just real quick, what does it mean Life Is Now? What’s the meaning of this?

David Neagle: Life Is Now came out of an experience that I had in 1989, I had a near-death experience. I had a pretty bad accident. I was water skiing and I got separated from the boat and I was sucked through a dam and I was one of only two people to survive going through it. And during that time of my life, I was not in a good place. I was having real trouble in my life, but I wasn’t doing anything to fix it and I didn’t know how to fix it.

The experience kind of woke me up to the idea that we don’t know how long we’re going to be here. If we’re going to do something or change something, we really need to do it now. So, fast forward to 1999, when I started to put my business together, I was thinking about what do I want to call this? And, you know, I was thinking everything really is about making decisions now, whether we’re creating something for the future, we’re changing something right now, it’s about what we do right now. So, that was where the name came from.

Andrea: Hmm, and I have listened to your story before about going through the dam and just that whole thing. We’re going to make sure that we link to your story from your podcast here on the show notes so that the listener can go find it there because it’s quite a story.

David Neagle: Yeah and that it is.

Andrea: Do you find that people who have gone through near-death experiences or really intense crises that they tend to be more ready for big changes in their lives?

David Neagle: Not only that, but what’s even kind of sad about it is that very often it takes something like that to precipitate a major change in a person’s life. I went out in my career trying to help people make that change before they hit that kind of a wall or a problem or a catastrophe in their life. But, yeah, I mean very often when you go through something like that, you start to question things.

It’s really fascinating, I think, Andrea, when you go through any kind of a crisis in your life, it shakes up what you know about your world. You know, you start thinking to yourself, “Is any of this true?” “Is it real?” “What’s important?” “What can I count on?” “What do I trust it?” It rattles the foundation of the illusion of safety that most people live in and it causes people to really think about what is true and real and important in their life from a very different place because it rattles their sets of security.

Andrea: Yeah.

David Neagle: And most people walk around in this illusion that we’re safe, everything’s going to be okay, just keep moving forward, not really taking things literally, too seriously. And then something happens to shift that and it could be a death. It could be an illness, it could be a partner has an affair on you that sometimes those things like that are the worst because you’ve trusted certain situations or people to be a specific way. And then you find out that they’re not that or you find out that the business or the job you have is it what you thought it was.

And you start to really question what can I trust in my life? What is actually real? It really shakes the core foundation of a person when they go through that. So, in that questioning, if they’re questioning intelligently and they’re actually really looking for answers, they usually come up with some pretty significant shifts over time for their life.

Andrea: Hmm. I’ve also found that people that have gone through that sort of pain. People who have really experienced pain seemed to be more willing to think about the things that they want to change and actually do something about it. And it does seem like just super significant when it comes to wanting to make a difference, to get out of the status quo and move out of a comfort zone.

David Neagle: Yeah, I agree. I absolutely agree with you.

Andrea: So, what does having a successful mind, your Successful Mind podcast, I guess I’m really fascinated by the titles that I have to work with what you do. Why does having a successful mind matter to someone who wants to have a voice of influence?

David Neagle: Well, I think the reason is this, we’re not taught how to think when we’re growing up, most people weren’t, anyway. And the inability to do so, I mean, we just take mental activity is the idea of thought and I guess clinically it’s thought but really being able to think productively for one’s life is something very, very different. And being able to observe the world in situations that we’re in, evaluate it well and then make solid concrete decisions, plans, and goals for how we’re going to navigate that is extremely important in a person’s life.

But we don’t learn it as children. So, very often we find people making decisions, choices, plans, and setting goals and they’re not aware of the consequences. They’re coming from a place where they’ve never really evaluated the cause and effect of different things in their life. And avoidance is also a decision and that’s a big one because there’s a lot of things like pain that you just mentioned in a person’s life that they will avoid because they don’t want to have to experience what that’s actually like to go through any kind of a significant change. I mean, I think the idea is that if we can learn to think better, we can then make better choices and have better outcomes and live richer and more fulfilling lives.

Andrea: And I know that you see a connection between the way that people think and what they feel and then how they act. How do those three things sort of interplay? Which one should somebody work on first, you know, do they take an action first? Should they work on their mindset first if they’re wanting to get out of a spot where they feel stuck?

David Neagle: Well, if a person is stuck, the first thing to understand is they’re resisting changing something. There’s something in their life they’re resisting because the universe is actually pretty clear for each person. But if we’re stuck, we’re resisting something. And if we’re in confusion, something that we’re evaluating in our thought processes is not true. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be in confusion. So, the idea would be that a person gets clear on what they want or what they don’t want. It could be one of the other, because very often a person’s in their life and you’ll ask them, “What do you want?” They’d be like, “I don’t know.” “Well, what don’t you want currently in your life?”

Well, that they can pretty much tell you. The things that are making them miserable or sad or they’re just not happy with. So, what I was saying was that the thoughts that we think correlate with emotional patterns in our life and that’s generally based on past experience. So, what’s really interesting about this is that the first seven years of our life, we don’t have the ability to critically think. We’re basically coming all from our subconscious mind.

Our conscious mind is not developed yet and that’s the part that gives us the ability to think critically. The subconscious mind doesn’t have the ability to reject anything that’s going around it. It just totally accepts everything in it. And then it creates patterns to navigate through life, to hopefully to keep us safe. In the process of this, we have an emotional correlation with how we see other people experiencing life. What is their emotional state around what they’re experiencing and then we go into kind of a mimicking pattern around our parental figures and people of authority. So, that’s really how most people set up their emotional base through life.

Now, once we get past the age of seven, what’s even more fascinating is that everything that we’re experiencing in life, our subconscious mind it’s already been preprogrammed with how to respond, tells our conscious mind what to do with what we’re experiencing on some level. And because we haven’t had all that many experiences yet by the age of seven, most of it is an emotional response first to what we’re experiencing. And then we tried to make some kind of intellectual sense over it. So, if we’re going to make a change, one of the things that we need to do is to make, create an intellectual truth around what it is that we want to create and then determine how do we create the supporting emotion that goes with that.

So that now we start to really link up a really good thought or idea and a really good positive emotion to go with it that correlates with it well. And then we take the action that we need to take to create the change in our life. When we get the feedback of that, we can either make corrections because it’s not quite right or it’s a good reaction. It’s positive. So we accept that reaction and then we begin to reprogram our subconscious mind for the success that we’re looking for.

Andrea: Could we take that to a practical level of, OK, so somebody wants to make a change in their health. I know that’s something that you’ve been talking about a lot more recently. If somebody is wanting to make that big shift, they know they want to make a change here, but they’re struggling because they may be start and then they end up failing or they start and they fail and that sort of thing. They get into that sort of rhythm of feeling like they can’t take it all the way to the finish line. How do you put what you just said about beliefs, emotion, and action, how do you put all that into play in that kind of a scenario?

David Neagle: So, here’s the reason why people do this, why they’ll say “I’m gonna do this in my life.” And then either they start doing it and fail or they procrastinate, they don’t do it, or they forget to do it. Nothing ever actually changes. The idea is that we have to go through a transformation of who we are. If we just take part of our behavior and say we’re just going to change that one part without changing all the parts that support the thing that we don’t want to be doing or don’t want to be experiencing, we’re pretty much doomed to going back to the old behavior. So, it requires a transformation on all levels in order for us to be able to do that.

So like if a person, if they want to get in better health, they have to look at how do they view health, like what is their belief around health. They have to look at how do they view the things that make them healthy and the things that don’t make them healthy. And then what are the emotions that go with those things? So, very often when a person is not healthy, it’s because they’re doing things to numb out or escape from the world in some way. Some people do exercise in a way that dumps them out for the world, but a lot of people don’t.

And they’ll do things like they’ll watch TV, they will eat things that are not good for them, they will drink too much, they become a couch potato, or they’re doing things to escape in some way. So, it’s not just about changing the behavior but changing kind of the substructure under it of what’s causing that behavior. Like why are we actually doing that when we do know better? So, the ideas that we really take a look at who we are overall and create a person that wants to embody wellbeing.

And so, it’s looking at all of the things that support health and all of the things that don’t support it. Removing the things that don’t support it and completely embodying it from a place of “I’m no longer going to associate with what doesn’t. I’m going to be this new person.” And then you have to be doing an act like that person every day.

Andrea: That is so significant. I just want to pause there for a second because becoming that person is such a huge piece of what I’ve heard you talk about that I think is so important. Can you just reiterate what it means to, you know, think that way?

David Neagle: Well, what it means is that you’re no longer going to tolerate the conversation in your mind about doing something that you don’t want to do. So, when we set a new goal or we decide that we’re going to be something different in our life, having a new experience, or live a different way, then most people start to make that change but they’re battling that voice in their head that says, “You can’t do this.” “Go eat the pizza.” “Go eat the ice cream.” “Don’t work out today,” or whatever. So, they’re always having this argument between the old self and the new self that they want to be. When we transform, we have to go to a place where that we will no longer tolerate the conversation at all.

So it’s much different level. It’s where we sit down and consciously say, “OK, here’s all the things that I want to do to make the change. But what I need to eliminate is this idea that I have this conversation in my head.” And we have the ability to stop that conversation, we just don’t engage. It would be like engaging somebody in your life who’s constantly all they want to do is argue. Well, after awhile you find out that’s all they want to do. They don’t want to be productive. So, you stop engaging that person and if the person doesn’t stop, you remove that person from your life.

So, it’s the same thing with the voice in your head. You stop engaging that argument and you don’t leave things around that will allow you to, in a moment of weakness or being tired, go back to the way that you did things before. So, if you’re going to be healthy, like you don’t keep ice cream in the house so that when you’re tired at 2:00 a.m. and you can’t sleep, you don’t reach for the ice cream. You put something positive that’s going to support the direction that you want to go as a resource to help you get there.

Andrea: Hmm, so good, so good! OK, let’s move this conversation toward money. This is not a comfortable subject for me historically. I’m much more comfortable with it now than I used to be. But what are some of the reasons why people are uncomfortable talking about money, thinking about finding success around their financial success.

David Neagle: One of the reasons is because we have a lot of shame around it. We have a love-hate relationship with money in our society, and very often money is a representative of how we value ourselves, or let’s take this back a little bit. It’s a representative how our parents valued themselves. So, the amount of money that they made or didn’t make really kind of set up their social status in the world.

And you will find that if you have a money problem that there was some kind of judgment that your parents had either around people that had much more money than them or people that didn’t have as much money, in many cases both. So, we have to go in and really tackle what is in our internal money story and how is that connected to the love, the security, the appreciation, and the acceptance that we got from our parents. Because very often people will hit this point in their lives where they struggle with actually making more money than their mom or their dad and I’m not talking about a little bit more. I’m talking about significantly more. And they lose that relationship because they actually saw their parents have the idea that making too much money was not good and they don’t want to be labeled that. So, what’s true is that if you start to make a lot more money than you’re currently making now, people are going to notice that.

They’re going to see you and some people are going to judge you for it. And we instinctively know this, so we move away from it, plus all the things that we have to do to make money cause us to combat the value system that we have, especially if we were raised middle class and not entrepreneurial.

Andrea: So, I’m tracking with you and I totally see this. What do you think is the importance of, I mean, why would somebody choose to pursue making more money? I could tell you my story, but I’m curious about the stories that you’ve heard over the years. Why is it important?

David Neagle: Yeah. I think the number one important reason from a value proposition is this. It teaches a person how to become financially independent. So, if I learn how to earn money and I can do it regardless of whatever situation comes down in my life, I’m free.

Andrea: Yes!

David Neagle: If I’m totally reliant upon other people for money, I’m not free. And then I have to make decisions based on the idea of acceptance or performance, which are not good because they keep me in a creative prison, so to speak, and I don’t get to live my life the way that I want. We all know that more money will give us better vacations and jobs and colleges for our kids and all that kind of, cars, you know, all the material stuff, which is fine in and of itself. If that’s what you want, there’s nothing wrong with those things.

But fundamentally, it’s to set ourselves free so that we don’t become slaves to not understanding how to bring money into our lives. And that’s what I teach people. And it’s not just an interesting idea. I don’t just teach it from the intellect. We actually help people create multi-seven figure businesses and lifestyles and they can replicate it on their own over and over and over again throughout their entire lifetime.

Andrea: I really do think that is just so significant. You know, I even look at our kids, we have a 10 and 12 year old kids. And one of the things that I’ve realized that they’ve begun to do is they’ve begun to think in terms of, “OK, I need money in order to pursue this thing.” “OK, how am I going to do that?” “What business do I want to create?” “What do I want to sell, or what do I want to do that’s gonna…” And I’m seeing them live in more freedom in that regard than I ever did when I was a kid for sure, because just what you said, they know how to bring money into their lives. And I’m like, “Wow, that’s so significant for the rest of their lives.”

David Neagle: It absolutely is. I mean, either we develop the mindset and the skill set to be able to create whatever amount of money that we need whenever we need it, or we live a life in trade and a life where we come up with a perfect reason why we can’t be better or do better or contribute better in the world.

Andrea: Yeah. You know, when you talk about sales and transactions and all that sort of thing, I don’t want to get it wrong, but it seems like what you’re saying is that if I am dependent upon this next sale in order to be okay, then this is going to feel like a transaction, I’m going to be pushy and that sort of thing. But if I know how to bring money into my life in that sense then I can offer what I have as a sale if somebody’s interested without it being as pushy and it’s an opportunity instead. I mean, is that an okay way to describe what you are talking about when you talk about sales?

David Neagle: Absolutely. I mean, most people think that sales is something that you do to someone and for an unethical person or a person that’s under a lot of pressure from an employer to meet a monthly quota or something that would be accurate. But really and truly sales is something you do for someone else. Meaning that if you have someone, like when you make a sale, what we’re really doing is solving a problem for another person. So, it’s important to be influential, not manipulative. And if we’re influential and we meet the other person’s needs and we get them to clarity about their decision, they’re either going to say yes or no. And that’s all sales should be, is that we get them to be clear about their yes and their no. If we do that properly and we understand how to do that, we will never have an issue with sales in our given businesses or employment.

Andrea: Great! So, if somebody is being influential in the sales process, from what I understand you just said, that’s means you’re bringing clarity to their situation so they can see the options in front of them basically.

David Neagle: Correct.

Andrea: Yeah. That makes so much sense.

David Neagle: And that they can make a decision, so that they can make a decision based on what’s best for them.

Andrea: So the influence is in bringing clarity not in pushing them towards a particular answer.

David Neagle: Absolutely not. That’s extremely unethical because that’s all about you…

Andrea: You said because that’s all about you and…

David Neagle: It’s all about you and your agenda and it has nothing to do with them. And sales should not be about you and your agenda, even though you have one, it is about developing your skill set in a way that allows you to communicate with another human being where they have trust and they want to buy from you and you’re looking for the right people to buy your product or your service and you’re helping them become clear about what the benefits are and if it’s something that they want or will help them.

If you look at every salesperson that does something unethical, what’s you say, pushy, right? And let’s not even go unethical, let’s just say they’re pushy. It’s all fear-based. It’s based on, they don’t have enough. It’s based on, they won’t sell enough or it’s based on, they don’t want to talk to as many people as they need to talk to or do the marketing that’s required or do the travel that’s required. It’s all based on what they don’t want to do. If a person’s really coming from embracing that position and skill set in their life for what it is, and salespeople are the highest paid people in the world, they will do whatever is necessary from an ethical perspective to make sure that they’re hitting their numbers, which may mean that they have to see more people. They have to talk to more people. They have to do more instead of pushing people that aren’t sure whether they want your product or service into a decision that they’re not ready for.

Andrea: So when it comes to making changes, and kind of circle back around, so whether that these changes be changes in your life around health or changes in your life around money, money mindset, money success, sales that sort of thing; what are the first steps for somebody who is really wanting to make a quantum leap, like you talked about, what are the very first things that they should be thinking about or doing or feeling in order to really start moving in that direction in making a really big change?

David Neagle: There are two very important things. One is that they’re very clear on what they want. And the second one is what they’re prepared to sacrifice to get it.

Andrea: Hmm.

David Neagle: You have to bring in that part because if you don’t sit down and really consider what the sacrifices, you won’t accept it. And then when you hit the first stumbling block or something that you have to change, it’s going to be the perfect excuse for you not to do it. I think another thing is that one of the things that we do with our coaching clients is we help them unravel their stopping strategy or their failure strategy because it is a strategy for every person. Like how do you stop in life? What causes you to stop?

And what’s important to know about that is that when a person does that, when a person stops, they set a goal, they’re going to go after the goal and then somewhere along that journey, they quit. They’ve actually come into agreement with some situation or circumstance in their life that is in that moment more important than the goal. So, we’re either setting weak or impotent goals that are not strong enough to help pull us through the difficult stages of moving through a goal or we’re letting other things sabotage that because they’d become more important because we haven’t dealt with some internal issue, we’re never going to move forward in our life.

Andrea: Hmm, so good. Alright, David so what are the different offerings that you have through Life Is Now, Inc.?

David Neagle: Well, I mean, there’s a lot of different things. Generally, we work with a business owners and high-end employees to better their life in various different ways, whether that is through coaching or through strategic, business building or a specific skill set. But what people can do is they can go to our website davidneagle.com. There’s a free download there called You Were Born to be a Success, they should read that. They should really take a look at it and see how it resonates with them and where they want to go in their life.

Andrea: Thank you so much for being here and we will make sure to link all of that in the show notes. So, David, one last thing, what would be the parting words that you’d like to leave with people who really do want to have a voice of influence?

David Neagle: Make a decision to embrace the opportunity that’s in front of you currently. That’s the whole Life Is Now concept, like the universe doesn’t hold anything back and there’s something in front of every person right now that would give them the opportunity to do that and have that change in their life, but they have to make a decision to do it.

Andrea: Alright. Thank you for calling us to action for calling us to have a successful mind and to actually move forward in our lives. David, appreciate you sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

David Neagle: Thank you so much, Andrea! It was great being here!

Posted on Monday, September 2, 2019

Creating Moments of Delight for Customers with Fred Skoler

Episode 105

Fred Skoler is an award-winning digital innovator, product manager and user experience executive who thrives at the intersection of business results and fun, and I really think this conversation is going to be fun. Since founding MGM Interactive in 1994, Fred has produced hit video games, designed simulations for the US Department of Defense, consulted on user-facing UX for digital advertising, wellness, health insurance, and delivered social games for social good.

In this episode, Fred discusses what he did at Sears in terms of gamification, why you need to have empathy for your customers, how he transitioned from a career in performing arts to what he does now, the main tool he uses to help his potential clients see the need for his services, the importance of setting varied goals, doing smaller tests, and getting feedback along the way, how to determine when to set feedback aside, how gamification helps companies meet their customers where they’re at, and so much more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, we have Fred Skoler with us. He is an award-winning digital innovator, product manager and user experience executive who thrives at the intersection of business results and fun, and I really think this conversation is going to be fun. Since founding MGM Interactive in 1994, Fred has produced hit video games designed simulations for the US Department of Defense, consulted on user-facing UX for digital advertising, wellness, health insurance, and delivered social games for social good.

Andrea: I’m so excited to have you here on the Voice of Influence podcast, Fred.

Fred Skoler: Hey, hey, I’m Fred. Hey, I know, I’m very excited to be here too. Thank you for inviting me.

Andrea: Fred, let’s start with what did you do with Sears, because I think that might give us an idea of what exactly you do with gamification?

Fred Skoler: OK, sounds great. I think a lot of people wondered when I was at Sears, what I did for Sears. I think there’s a lot of head-scratching like, “OK, well what is that guy doing?” And then ultimately the results spoke for themselves because there were a lot of leaders who didn’t really follow it.

The great news is I worked in collaboration with the chairman to execute the vision for the gamification of kind of the loyalty program called Shop Your Way. And that involved leveraging all of the resources of this, at the time, very large company with multiple marketing groups, 13 business units, a lot of excitement, a lot of engagement around e-commerce, but a deep need to better understand our customers. So, I was brought on to start to work out some of the gamification of the experience. So, if you are earning points for activities, if you are playing games with your friends, if you’re interacting with product and you are sharing your joy, your love, and your happiness around whatever it is that you bought, all of those things kind of played into the role. And it was my job to kind of take that soup and focus it in ways where we would see the results that the business was looking for. And my initial projects were under a group called Integrated Retail Labs and I worked with them to develop something called Sweeps, which was the gamification of the Shop Your Way e-commerce website. I created 50 behavioral kind of little modules that you could combine in groups and have people do these things so that they could be entered into sweepstakes. And sweepstakes, as we may know is a federally regulated thing. It’s not just something you can just run out there and do. So, there are all kinds of elements to that that have to be tuned and assured that they are compliant with what’s going on in the environment that you’re serving. So, I put that together and the tools to drive the engagement. And in the first year, you know, we had 10,000 different sweepstakes that came out. This came, you know, prior. It was costing them like 30,000 sweepstakes and they could do five or six of them a year, 10,000. That was what we got out there. We had 33 million users. We did our job and that was really exciting.

Andrea: Wow, that’s amazing! So is that kind of what you’re doing now with DigiSnax?

Fred Skoler: You know what, in DigiSnax, I’m the chief product officer. So, I work with clients to help them find more value from their customer interactions by leveraging different types of digital experiences. And digital in this context can be apps, web, smart devices, sensors, and things like that and combining that with physical space to feed data models to produce the business results. And the area where I excel is in finding ways to assure that we don’t lose the empathy for our customers in their journey and that we respect them as much as we gain from having them interact with us.

Andrea: OK, so what does that mean to have empathy for the customer in their experience when you’re talking about a digital experience? How do you have empathy? How do you put yourself in their place or what do you mean by that?

Fred Skoler: That’s a great question. You know, a long time ago, I worked with a company called Whatif Productions and the reason for that company was to let someone walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. And that was a totally digital experience. Today, now, you know, 20 years later, we actually have the tools with augmented reality, virtual reality to give someone an experience that isn’t only screen in front of their eyes, but something that’s entirely immersive. But even in that experience where I’m walking and I’m holding on to my phone, there are lots of things that we need to think about. If my primary user is someone who is a woman who has a baby, then I’ve got to consider she’s holding that phone with one hand she need, because she might have the baby in her other arm or a caregiver. Let’s say I’m a father, I’m going to focus on a female user because of some of the size differentiation, of some of the newer phones and where you might need to put buttons depending on the actions that you want her to accomplish. So, the empathy there is understanding that she is hurried or she is dealing with a million things at once. She doesn’t want a lot of noise and she also wants to be respected. She doesn’t want to feel like you’re using her to get something. She wants to feel like it is a symbiotic relationship. So the way that you do design the user interaction, the way that you create that digital experience needs to take these things into account. And my background is in the arts. I come from performing, writing, and directing and that stuff really matters to me and I think it really matters to our customers. And that’s why we see a lot of, well, you know, we get good results when we put good things out there in front of our customers and we truly listen.

Andrea: Hmm. So, how does your background with the arts, writing, directing, performing have a connection with what you’re doing now? I love it. I come from some of a performing background as well. So, I’m really curious to hear about some of that experience or how did you get into this? How did you get here from there?

Fred Skoler: Oh, that’s a good one. You know, it’s interesting because I started off talking about context. I think context is really everything. I was living in LA and I was working sometimes as an actor, but mostly I was working in, actually, digital engagement. I was a founder of MGM Interactive and that came to me because of the work I’ve done with a group called Synapse Technologies where I was their director of operations, but then became a kind of a producer of little digital experiences. And in talking with their strategy and development lead at MGM, there’s a real opportunity to take the licenses, the movies, and turn them into things that people could relate to in an interactive environment. And that was the primary focus there. So, we started making video games based on movie licenses, things like Golden Eye for the Nintendo 64 and other things. And for me, the moment of truth was I was there. We had a little talk earlier, I had some kids and I was actually in the delivery room when a script came to me for an audition the next day for a major movie with a director I really admired. And it was a moment of reckoning, you know, it was your big break and it was. It was the breakthrough for me where I realized I had to prepare and focus on my family. And it also made kind of that, “How do you bridge the gap between digital and human?” You know, that connection with me, my daughter, my wife and my family and OK, now I’m going to double down on how do we do that. And I started to work with a company where our objective was to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. You know, what might it feel like to, gosh, I have a diabetes and I have colorblindness associated with that or losing some feeling on your legs or whatever it might be, giving someone that opportunity to have that experience so that they could create for themselves a different context rather than judging, understanding. And so from that perspective, I think the arts are critical. I think the idea of having empathy for the user is critical to being able to drive true experience and something where people just aren’t doing it. They’re doing something because they actually want to because they see value in it and then they see more value in your brand and your services.

Andrea: Do you find that it is difficult for companies to really take that perspective to really empathize to be able to really imagine the other person, that sort of thing? I know that we have to be seeking out big business results. But at the same time, it sounds like you’re saying we have to meet the customer where they are and communicate with them in a way that is going to be helpful for them and possible for them to really interact seamlessly. But yet, is it difficult for companies to really bridge that gap in their own way of thinking?

Fred Skoler: I think that you point out something really powerful. I would say yes, but no, because right now that’s kind of murky. The reality is that there may not be the talent that understands this side of human behavior and action and interaction. There’s a lot of data, but there needs to be context for that data. And because companies are starting to realize and truly understand that they need to know their customers, they’re starting to see the value in this. And I think this is where a really exceptional product manager comes in, and it’s part of what makes a great product manager is being able to be the advocate of all these sides. So, being able to share in terms that leadership understands that value and benefit of doing these things is kind of the bigger role, I think of people like me. I can say, “Look, I got a 47 percent increase in sales from people who are playing these silly games.” “Why is that?” “Well, because I had them in the palm of my hand. I knew exactly what they wanted.” I figured out ways to innovate on basic concepts like sweepstakes in such a way so that we could tune the experience to tell us exactly what someone wanted. Not just, “Hey, here’s something really shiny and cool, do you want it?” “What do you want?” “And if you win that’s what you’re gonna get.” And then take that information and use it in context to then help someone through their journey.

Andrea: So, when you’re having these conversations with the executives or the companies who are wanting this, but they’re having a hard time actually getting there or maybe they’re not sure what they want or they’re not sure how, you know, why it’s important, that sort of thing, what kinds of things do you call upon to help them to understand? So, statistics, you just shared statistics, I mean, in terms of your voice of influence with a company and helping people them to understand it, what kind of things do you employ to do that?

Fred Skoler: One of the big tools that I use is agile, and the agile framework and a lot of different approaches to driving kind of creative discovery, business discovery, and of course production and product management, all can be driven through some of these similar tools. These tools provide a framework by which you can truly focus teams on what’s most important. Because the reality is, you know, if you don’t know what you want and why you want it and what the outcome specific you’re looking for, it’s going to be quite difficult to hone in on what it is that I’m delivering. But those tools help focus these clients so that they know what they’re looking for. And then we have something that’s measurable. So, we have those statistics. We can drive those measurements. We can assure that they’re being tallied from the beginning and we can also do this in an iterative way. We don’t come in and say, “Boom, we got to blow this.” You know, we can do all kinds of little tests.

Andrea: So, iterative changes, not taking on the whole big thing all at once and trying to say that this is the answer, but to have these little tests and say, OK, this one works, this didn’t and that sort of thing, right? Is that what you mean by that?

Fred Skoler: That is, you know, with a lot of experience in road mapping development, you can have goals that are years out. You can have aspirational goals and you can have near term, what are the pieces that you need. One of the ways I like to look at it is, you know, if you’re going to get in a car, you need a few things. Meaning, I need a steer. I need the wheels and I need to be able to sit in this thing, probably I need a motor unless where I’m going is, you know, gravity is going to pull me down that kind of thing. But if it’s four things that I need then I work on those four things first and make sure that those are the things that are going to lead to the outcome that I’m looking for. So, you do a lot of prototyping. You use different types of tools to assure that everyone understands what it is that we’re doing and then you’re able to test it and iterate. I think that whole idea of getting stuff done, sometimes we change stuff to the expletive. You know, that GSD, being able to know what it is that you want and move forward on it rather than trying to do the perfect everything. Get some feedback, get it out there, do it in certain iterative ways and have a genuine discussion with your community at the same time so that you’re not only working from your feedback on what you’re saying, you’re starting to get feedback from real people who really use your product.

Andrea: Hmm. How do you know when the feedback that you’re getting is going to be helpful for the spectrum of folks or if it’s feedback that needs to be kind of put to the side? Or do you ever say, “OK, this particular piece of feedback doesn’t seem to be helpful for where we’re headed.” How do you know when to pay attention to it and when to set it aside?

Fred Skoler: That’s another great one. I think a lot of this comes from experience, but it’s driven by kind of a ruthless prioritization. You know, always looking toward what is it that we really need and going back to, you know, why and some of those specifics. And what we do in product development is we create these user stories. Tell the specifics of what it is we’re trying to do and what the outcome that is expected and what it might be. And so what we do is we leverage that piece of data and we go back to it again and again, “Hey, are we hitting that or is this something new?” And it’s a management challenge as well. But that’s part of why I guess that product manager role is such an important one and that the product manager has the skill set to be able to drive the product forward and make sure that it’s communicated correctly among all of the stakeholders.

Andrea: Hmm. And it sounds like keeping the focus where you want the focus to be, because it’s so easy to get distracted by other things. But if you keep coming back to what you originally set out as what you want and what you’re trying to accomplish, you know, all that clarity that you gained at the beginning. I’m thinking about the entire Voice of Influence audience here who may not necessarily into like gamification but they might be thinking about some of this stuff. And I’m thinking that, you know, it’s easy to get distracted. It’s easy to get distracted by the things, but if you keep coming back to where you started and keep coming back to what you’ve set out to do and accomplish at the beginning, I mean, you have to almost be ruthless with that.

Fred Skoler: You do, you do. And that’s providing the context for what we’re doing. We have to know. And if we don’t know then we haven’t done enough homework, and to jump in without done that homework is inefficient. It wastes, you know, everybody’s time and money, and that’s like the gem. So, coming back to leadership, you say, “Look, do you really want me to waste your time and money on that or do you want to do what you set out to do?” And if they want it in the weeds and you know, micromanaging then they can but they need to know and you need to have the answers as to “Look, this is gonna add number of days to your project.” And in so doing, we are going to be removing these resources that would, otherwise, be working on what you really want and it’s going to be much further down the line or we’re going to add more people to the team and it’s going to cost so much more. But those are kind of logical responses to what sometimes are kind of emotional needs, you know, “Oh, we saw this and we really want that.” “Why do you want that?” “Because we saw it and it looks really cool.” “Well, will it drive your initial need?” “We don’t even have a car yet. We don’t have four wheels. We don’t have a steering wheel.” OK, what we’ll do is we’ll put that on our list of wishes and then we’ll assess it as far as the value it provides to meet our goals, as far as how many resources we need to achieve that goal. And then we’ll look at that in that context and determine whether or not it’s something we want to put effort into, because it may be that the way to achieve that is by doing 10 little things, and each of those things has a cost, but there may be something else that brings more value that only has one or two steps that we can achieve very quickly with the resources we have on board right now. That seems to be from my perspective where we would want to focus. What do you think leadership?

Andrea: That is so helpful and applicable to anybody? I want to get back now before we close this conversation; I want to go back to gamification. What are some reasons why people or companies should use gamification? I know that you care about connecting with a customer? You care about that empathy and actually meeting them where they’re at that sort of thing. How do games do that?

Fred Skoler: Well, I think a lot of it is our understanding of what games are. Marketing is games. It is at its core. It’s finding the triggers that drive your customer forward. Now, if that trigger is an overt activity that has an outcome that is understood then maybe we go, “OK, that’s a little game.” But there are other ways of using these tactics without it being a game. Meaning, as you are going through certain types of content, if I highlight elements in that content, let’s say in a website, so that your eye goes to it and those are the most important features of my product that I want you to know about. I’m leading you. I am using the context of your experience to drive you forward. Now, if I do things there that you start to learn that when you do that, like if you were to click on one of those things, you always get a coupon or you always get a piece of additional insight that I’m teaching you that by clicking on the stuff that I put in front of you, there’s value in it. And by doing that often enough, you’ll start clicking on this stuff that I put in front of you because you know you’re getting value from it, and that’s gamification. This is my perspective because there are gamification platforms that have, you know, ribbons and badges and all sorts of things. There are a limited number of customers who are going to be driven by those pieces. There is value in that and the reality is there’s a very high percentage of us who are considered gamers because of the amount of time that we might touch a game in our day, so many more than we probably thought. My mom was a hardcore gamer. All she did was, you know, she played spider solitaire, but when she had some downtime, that’s what she would do. She was probably playing an hour a day. And some of those factors are part of what we call a hardcore gamer. She’s not the, you know, 70, 80-year-old woman. It might not be what we think of immediately when we think hardcore gamer. But the reason she did that wasn’t because she’s like “Oh, I gotta play a game.” She’s just like, “Oh, I could do better.” In that game there were some very clever tactics, including the sound which would drive activity and the need almost this compulsion to want to come back. Now, those same principles can be used in pretty much any customer journey, whether it’d be delightful colors, whether it be a loading screen, whether it be the way that something sounds or feels. These moments of delight if used to reward at the right time is what I would call gamification. The specific use of games to drive data, which could then be leveraged to kind of increased sales, that sort of thing that’s clear and strong and good stuff. That’s the big part of what I implemented at Sear’s Holdings, but these more subtle elements that we may call, you know, marketing that’s a use of gamification as well.

Andrea: I love the definition that you used or even the phrase that you used, moments of delight. Offering those is what helps people to know to take the next step, to want to take the next step, which does seem very empathetic. At the same time I wonder, could you also help us to know when do we take that too far? When does it become manipulation? How do you navigate that desire to offer something beautiful, delightful, or gratifying? And how can that go too far? Have you seen it go too far?

Fred Skoler: Well, I think it has to do with your customer and your brand identity. So, it would be wrapped up in kind of that and even using technologies like machine learning to drive certain types of information. Some of it, if it’s overused may seem creepy. Some of it may seem fun. That is more about that empathy. That is more about bringing people to the team who has this unique insight because it’s not necessarily something that’s teachable. So, one of the teams that I’ve been on in a large company, they ran a survey and they were basically talking about the archetypes on a team, and one of the things that was missing through their executive team consistently was empathy. And without that, you can’t be driving, in my opinion, a customer focused experience. You can talk the talk, but unless you feel what it’s like, you don’t know. And you know, you can research your butt off, but at the same time, you do need to truly kind of consume yourself with that experience. In my background, that’s what I used to do. You know, that’s part of what it is in comedy and doing improvisational comedy, coming up with characters quickly that sort of thing, that’s the activity. And leveraging that rich experience and bringing it to something that could be seen as just, you know, ones and zeros is what for me is really joyful and why I really liked doing what I do.

Andrea: Love it. I love that so much. I’m glad that you’re out there doing it. I’m glad that somebody with empathy is able to go out there and help companies do this well and bring with you integrity and a desire to truly help the customer. So thank you. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for your voice of influence. Fred, so you are going to be speaking at the Digital Experience Summit for the Strategy Institute in Chicago in September. We’ll link to that in the show notes. I’m also speaking there. What are you going to be talking about?

Fred Skoler: Oh, I’ll be talking about gamification kind of integrating the seamless digital and physical experiences for your customers, why that experience has been kind of a game changer for companies like Sears, where the rich data and that rich intent truly knowing what someone wants has become, you know, super meaningful. And part of, you know, what it really takes to do something to create that loyalty program, something that’s really going to work today. I start going and wanted to talk about it. It’s exciting stuff for me and so I’m talking about those sorts of things.

Andrea: It’ll be great. So, if you are in Chicago, if you’re headed to Chicago, if you’re interested in that conference, it’s going to be a really, really good one. You can come to our show notes and check it out at voiceofinfluence.net. Fred, how can people get in touch with you if they’re interested in working with you or what do you do with other companies?

Fred Skoler: Well, I’ve been working in a word of mouth capacity in my consulting and I’m very happy to engage with the listeners in any way that might be helpful. I’m always happy to lend a hand where I can. You know, you can find me on LinkedIn. Right now, I think I’m using my full name Frederick Skoler, but you can call me Fred with an f, not a ph. And there’s supposed to be a laugh there.

Andrea: I was holding it back. I’m not going to lie. I don’t know if I’m supposed to laugh or not but that was funny.

Fred Skoler: You know, it’s a very quiet room and you can hear the crickets, right? So if you’re interested in bringing a little more fun and joy to your products and if you are looking for someone who can help you do that from a very pragmatic standpoint and someone who understands the kind of the business side in building teams, I’m your guy. You can reach me at fskoler, so F as in Fred, fskoler@digisnax.com byte-size pieces, got it? Byte size, this is a digital goodness.

Andrea: Nice.

Fred Skoler: You know, I can help you do that.

Andrea: That’s fantastic! OK, again, we will have links to all of what Fred just mentioned in the show notes just to make it easy to connect with him if you’d like to. Thank you so much for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners today, Fred.

Fred Skoler: Oh thank you, Andrea, and thank you, listeners, for letting me take a little bit of your time today.

Posted on Monday, August 26, 2019

How to Not Be Weird When Selling with Liz Dederer

Episode 104

Liz Dederer is disrupting sales for good. As founder and CEO of Selling With Service and the creator of Sales School for Entrepreneurs, Liz and her team have helped clients increase close rates from zero percent to 80 percent in 30 days, and ended the year 50 percent over their plan and have turned around an underperforming sales team from under $300,000 to over $1.2 million in six months. In other words, this woman gets things done! Liz has been featured on the International Women and Money Summit and is currently on her second speaking tour on the Currency of Conversation, empowering women sales teams and business owners to close clients quickly.

In this episode, Liz explains what she means when she says, “How you do money is how you do everything,” the four currencies that impact our money conversations, the quick and easy way she can tell if her potential clients are a “hard or soft currency” person and how that changes her interaction with them, the difference between having a sales energy and a service energy, the true difference between an amateur and an expert and how to know when it’s time to own your expertise, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Liz Dederer’s Website
Sales School for Entrepreneurs
Liz Dederer’s Resources for Entrepreneurs
Email Bill Coletti | bcoletti@kith.co
Fascinate Assessment

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. I’m really thrilled to have Liz Dederer here today because she is distracting sales for good. As founder and CEO of Selling With Service and the creator of the Sales School for Entrepreneurs, Liz and her team have helped clients increase close rates from zero percent to 80 percent in 30 days, and end of the year 50 percent over their plan and have turned around an underperforming sales team from under $300,000 to over $1.2 million in six months. In other words, this woman gets things done. Liz has been featured on the International Women and Money Summit and is currently on her second speaking tour on the Currency of Conversation, empowering women sales teams and business owners to close clients quickly.

Andrea: Liz, it is great to have you here today with me on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Liz Dederer: Thank you. I’m so excited that we get to have this fun conversation together.

Andrea: I am too. Every conversation with you is fun.

Liz Dederer: Yay!

Andrea: It totally is. Yes, I’m thrilled to share you with our listeners. So, Liz, why don’t you kind of give us a little bit more context for what you do with Selling With Service?

Liz Dederer: The way I explained it to my 7-year-old daughter is that I help mommies make a lot of money.

Andrea: There you go.

Liz Dederer: That’s the simplest, mommies and daddies or nonparents, or grownups, right? So, Selling With Service is really just about helping people be normal in sales conversations and giving them the tools, the talk, and the tech to be able to use their voice in a more empowered way as the expert that they are in sales conversations by shifting their sales mindset and looking at sales for what it actually is, which is really healthy service-based conversation and process.

Andrea: Now that sounds really appealing.

Liz Dederer: Yeah.

Andrea: Yeah, yeah, it sounds really appealing. OK. We’re going to make sales normal, sound normally. I mean, in general, how do you do that?

Liz Dederer: Magic! It’s shifting your sales mindset. We look at things in Sales School for Entrepreneurs and in Selling With Service in general, we look at first, what is your relationship with money because how you do money is how you do everything. And to be honest, the reason and the point and the sales process or conversation when people start getting weird is around the money stuff, because we’ve never been taught to speak confidently or competently around about money. In fact, we’re like totally conditioned on the opposite, “Don’t talk about money.” “It’s rude to ask people how much they make.” “They can afford it. You can’t afford it.”

All of those things come up. So, we come right out of the gate and we use a proprietary assessment, the eight languages of money so that you understand what your money language is and we talk about the currency of conversation. So, we just come at it right out of the gate talking about money and the softer side of money. And then we look at what is sales, so let’s unpack it? What do you think it is versus what is it really?

You know, there’s a reason I named the company Selling With Service because it’s all about being in service and of service to other people. And then the results of a healthy relationship or understanding of your relationship with money, understanding and being able to identify it in others as well and having the tools, talk, and tech to be able to navigate a conversation. The healthy outcome of that is that you’re working with more people because you’re not weird in conversations.

Andrea: Oh man, I love it! Yeah, I mean, I had a really hard time with this and have made it over a pretty darn big hump in my own life and my own business on this. And so I am really excited about what you’re doing because I know that it changes everything. So, you said this, you said “How you do money is how you do everything.” What do you mean by that?

Liz Dederer: So, we look at your relationship with money, and money is one of the four currencies. And the four currencies, I use the acronym TEMP like temperature; it’s Time, Energy, Money, and People and how you operate with money shows up in the other categories of currency. If you’re really, really possibly stingy with money, we’ll just use these two kinds of _____ as an example. If you’re really, really stingy with money that’s likely going to show up in other areas of your life and your business and how you’re approaching conversations and the extent of information you’re willing to give away because you have a hold, a lack mentality on time, energy, money and people; a fear scarcity based.

Andrea: OK, so stingy with money could translate into stingy in your conversations and how much you’re willing to offer of yourself or be vulnerable and all those sorts of things.

Liz Dederer: Exactly. Yeah, so it can look like, and it’s not an absolute, right? But it can look like and it does look like and this is what we teach people how to listen and look for. It can start to show up in the sales process where they say, “Well, I already gave them a free sample.” “I already explained it to them.” “I already, you know, did this.” “They already have what they need.”

But sometimes people just need a little bit more information, and someone who is more on the fear scarcity side is not going to be as willing to maybe get on another phone call, you know, build the relationship a little bit more, give a little bit more energy and put a little bit more into the people bank and the relationship bank because they’re operating through the lens of fear and scarcity, which is not wrong. It’s not wrong.

In my presentations, I have this diagram. I’ve got it off the internet where it’s two people looking at the number six and one is saying six and one is saying nine. And neither is wrong, but it’s your perspective and it’s just about understanding others, you know. So, the other side of that is if someone is overly generous and overly nurturing and overly giving, me, all soft currency, I’m kind of boundary-less and limitless. And you know, I lose track of time with clients and if someone needs another conversation before they decide if sales was right for them, myself and my team, we’re all ready to jump in. And yeah, we have to keep track of the time because you know, we have other things going on but I’m not going to say “Nope, gotta go, your time’s up.” Like if someone needs more coaching, if they need more help or support, we’re very, very flexible and willing and giving because that’s how we are with all of our currencies.

So, two extremes, one is not right, one is not wrong, it just it’s important to notice because when you’re in a “sales” conversation, and I’m using air quotes with sales because any conversation where you know there’s a desired outcome or you want to move an initiative forward. Getting your kids to pick up their room is a sales conversation, right? Let’s just be honest.

Andrea: Totally.

Liz Dederer: You need to understand what’s most important in those conversations is understanding and speaking the language of the other person. So, when we recognize what our money language is, what our relationship with currency is then we’re going to know how that’s going to show up in conversations and where we might self-sabotage or etc. And we’ll also just be aware of it to hear it showing up in the conversation to say, “Oh, is this my language I’m speaking or is this theirs?”

Andrea: Hmm. How do you know?

Liz Dederer: So with the acronym TEMP, I try to make it really simple for people to listen. I used to teach, you know, and explain the eight languages of money so people could hear that. And I’m like, “Well, it’s too much. It’s too much, put a _____.” We cannot remember our own names at times. So, I try to make it really simple, just listen for the hard and the soft currency. Hard currency is time and money and soft currency is energy and people. So, if someone’s using filling words a lot like “This is gonna be so exciting, I can’t wait.” “This is gonna be great, really looking forward to playing.” Those are total soft currency person.

Energy people, if something fun is going on, if there’s people involved; they’ll want to be there, right? And if someone says, “Well, what time and what are we going to get out of it?” “What exactly is going on?” And more precision based language, time, money then they’re going to be a harder currency person and you’ll just want to speak in more detail with them. But if you start speaking in significant detail with a soft currency person, you’ve likely lost them. If you’re in the fun zone with a hard currency person, they’re likely not respecting you for being an expert and authority because you sound wishy-washy.

Andrea: Oh that’s so true.

Liz Dederer: Right?

Andrea: I see it in my own family. Some of us are one way, and some of us are another, yeah. So, do you have maybe like a couple things that you look for immediately to kind of gauge if somebody is really more of a hard currency or a soft currency kind of person?

Liz Dederer: Yeah, I mean, in our “sales conversations,” we call them service conversations once you go through the training. But if I say service conversations you’re going to be like, “What, is their washing machine broken? What’s going on?” So, in a sales calls, in a service conversations, you know, I’m talking to business owners, I’m talking to entrepreneurs, I’m talking to coaches, consultants and salespeople; so one of the questions we ask obviously is, you know, what are your numbers? What was your revenue over the past 12 months or what were your sales over the past 12 months? And I’ll hear right away if they’re hard or soft currency the way that they answer it.

Andrea: Sure.

Liz Dederer: So, if they, you know, come to the table and they have no clue about their numbers or they give me some really roundabout kind of, you know, dodgy answer, definitely it’s a soft currency person.

Andrea: Hmm.

Liz Dederer: Hard currency person, like I literally had this answer in a call and they said, “I’m not exactly sure what my numbers are.” So, I think soft currency right away. And then they continued, they said, “I haven’t updated my reports and we haven’t run the numbers for the business this week, but as of last week my numbers were dah, dah, dah, dah,” and x y z sense. And I’m like, “Holy crow, they weren’t confident in their numbers because they hadn’t been updated for that week, so they didn’t want to give me the numbers.” And I was like, “Wow, you’re really a hard currency.” “What’s going on?” That’s great. That’s good to know.

Andrea: Sure, sure. OK, I love that. I always love it when people have ways that they read people to know where they’re at because, like you said, any conversation where you’re attempting to get somebody to cooperate or to purchase something, it’s still a sales conversation. It’s some sort of its influence of some kind. And so, meeting people where they’re at is so vitally important, but yet it’s really hard to do. I love your hard versus soft currency model that you’re using, and it seems simple enough that people could really grasp onto that and really make something of that, you know, just listening to this conversation.

Liz Dederer: Yeah. I did it in a real estate investors’ conference I was keynoting and I had two gentlemen volunteer to do a role play. And the way that we worked the role play was just these guys hadn’t met. So, I said, “Just network in front of these thousands of people, please, #nopressure.”

Andrea: Wow!

Liz Dederer: So that’s it. They were just networking and it was great. I mean it, it was definitely a divinely guided conversation because it’s like you always take a risk when you do something like that, but it worked out really, really well.

So, one guy was an investor and the other guy was a lawyer and the lawyer was saying, “Oh, you know, I’ve got this client. He was looking to sell his house. He’s an artist. He’s lived in it for 30 years, but I think it was death or divorce or something, he has to get rid of it, but he’s done all these really intricate, cool things to the house but we do need to get it on the market, you know, sooner rather than later.” And then the investors said, “Do you know the value of the house and when is he looking to list it?” And you could instantly see the lawyer just completely deflated.

And the audience, it was interesting too, the women in the audience gasped because they were like, “No, you just killed it. You didn’t speak his language.” And the men in the audience like, “Doo, doo, doo, doo.” No idea of what’s going on. That was interesting. But this isn’t a man-woman thing and it was just a very interesting thing to notice. But what the women noticed was that the investor did not speak the lawyer’s language. One was very hard currency, one was very soft currency and all that needed to be done.

You don’t have to change who you are. You don’t have to completely change your language, you just have to validate and give them just a little sticky note that says “I hear you and this is how he could have done it.”

So, the lawyer was saying, you know, the artist and all this cool stuff, etc., etc. All that the investor needed to say was, “Wow, your client sounds really, really fascinating. Do you know the value of the house or when he wants to put it on the market?” That’s it, one bridge line.

Andrea: Brilliant. I love it. Alright, Liz, let’s talk service. How in the world is selling actually service?

Liz Dederer: Ha ha, great question. So, the answer, I mean, what are you doing when you’re selling, selling, selling, right? If you’re just like, “I’m in it for the kill, I’m in it for the money,” then you’re in sales, right? You’re in it for yourself. Sales energy is about yourself, “I need to sell this.” Service energy is about the other person. And to take it even more _____, sales energy is fear based and service energy is love and abundance based. We’re operating in the line of sales, you’re thinking about yourself, you’re thinking about fear, and you’re thinking about your numbers and there’s an element of fear and scarcity going on, “I need to make my goal.” “I don’t have enough in the bank,” or whatever it is. “I need to move more widgets.” I need to, you know, etc.

When you’re thinking through the lens of service, you’re not thinking about yourself. I tell my students all the time, lovingly, “Your business ain’t got nothing to do with you. It’s all about the other person.”

The purpose of a business is to create a customer. So, service is all about being available and helping the other person. It doesn’t mean that you can’t exchange hard currency. It doesn’t mean that money doesn’t get brought into the equation. It doesn’t mean that we’re all paupers on the street. It means that you’re thinking in terms of what is in the highest and best interest for all parties involved.

Andrea: Right?

Liz Dederer: That’s service. And you can’t give and give and give and at some point you’re going to have to say, “We need to set an official play date so I can really take this to the next level to help you.”

Andrea: Hmm. How do you know what that boundary line is? Maybe, it’s partly like you were talking about the assessment that you do and how people kind of fall someplace on this spectrum between sort of really soft and really hard currency. How does one determine when it’s time, like how much to give before they go ahead and ask for the sale?

Liz Dederer: So, in a service-based business where you’re selling a service, it comes down to really knowing and owning your zone of absolute brilliance, your zone of expertise, and how you do your work, right? You have to be really, really clear on your deliverable. And the reason I say that is because there are things that you can do to get a client ready to become a really good client. And that’s the service part of it.

We adopt the mindset; we teach in Sales School for Entrepreneurs, we adopt the mindset early and often that they’re already a client. And the goal is you want to make sure that they’re really great client by the time they actually become a client, so whatever you’ve got to do to help them get to that point. And then there is a point where you say, “This is what we do in Sales School.” “This is what we do in a strategic planning day when we map out your five points to profit.” So, you have a strong grasp on who you’re serving and what that looks like and how you’re priced, etc. That happens in this container.

So, if you’re ready for that, it sounds like you’re ready for that, we can definitely talk about that but that is the next step in me being able to be of service to you is you got to come play in Sales School or you need to set up, you know, a strategic planning day.

I struggle with the word boundaries because I’m like all soft currency, like water on concrete who just go everywhere. So, I love the word, one of my mentors, over the years, gave me this word to use instead, which is container.

Andrea: I really like that.

Liz Dederer: Yeah, and Sales School is my container where I get to just fire hose and just love on and drip on the students and give them everything. So, it’s a really healthy, happy container space for me to play in and I know what goes on in there and I know what I can give to people on the outside. And I also know with anybody there is going to be a point where I can’t give them any more. They have to come. You know, I can only splash you with water so much outside the pool, at some point you’re going to have to just jump in.

Andrea: Hmm, another good analogy. OK, so there are people out there like you, like me who sort of come from this mindset of service, and this is maybe, you know, prior to getting through all. I guess, I’m thinking about on the front end before they have really figured out what their container is and all that. They want to help. They see lots of opportunities to offer people advice, their expertise and all that sort of thing. And yet, they maybe start to feel resentment because they’re thinking to themselves, I could have charged for that.

What do you do to help somebody see that, you know, to help somebody get over their resentment toward the people that they actually really do want to serve? I remember there being such a contradiction that just really robbed with me and I wasn’t sure how to handle that. What would you tell me back, I don’t know, a couple of years ago before I started to kind of figure that out?

Liz Dederer: Well, that’s how my company was born is because I was doing exactly that. I was giving it all away. I actually have a video on my website, sellingwithservice.com, on the entrepreneurs’ page where I talk about how I was the busiest brokest entrepreneur because I was having great conversations and I was giving it all away and people were like, “Oh my God, you’re amazing!” And I’m like, “Gee, thanks!” And then they’d leave and I’m like, “But uh, uh, but uh, I got to eat.”

Andrea: Yeah.

Liz Dederer: So, that’s how all of my systems and processes were born organically is because I had to protect myself from myself from giving it all away, because what you’re actually doing is a disservice to the other person. You’re giving them a Band-Aid solution for a bleed and you haven’t fully identified why they’re bleeding.

Andrea: Yes, so good.

Liz Dederer: Yeah, and you know, I had to create ways to protect myself from myself because I knew, you know, it felt really good to do the energy exchange and to get the validation and they’re like, “You’re really smart.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, thank you.” Because I needed that in my life at the time, so that was my dominant currency is that I needed to be fed validation and energy and it’s not wrong.

It really built me in a lot of ways and I know a lot of other people go through this too, like “Who am I?” “What am I doing?” “Am I really good at this thing,” and all of that. So, the validation, there is nothing wrong and you build your validation bank and at some point you need to start building the money bank. And that’s where it’s just kind of having a lens to say, “Well, let me pull back for a minute.”

I’ll suggest people to consider that the expert asks questions, the amateur answers. So, when you’re having these conversations, you’re going to get to points over time having the same conversations with different people where you’re going to say, I need to ask more questions to understand what’s going on rather than just jump to the gun with a solution.

Andrea: Why do you suppose that’s the case? Why do you suppose the amateur jumps to answering questions? It’s so true, like I totally see it. Why is that?

Liz Dederer: Validation? We want to be proven that we’re right. We don’t know that we are yet, so we’re looking to build that evidence base, “Am I really good at this? Can I really do this? Can I really solve this problem? Is my salad any good?” Whatever it is.

Andrea: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

Liz Dederer: It’s feeding the soft currency side of things, building the relationships, having the conversations with people, getting the energy exchange, getting information in exchange for validation in return. You know, it’s working for validation, not cash. And then there does come a point where I’m like, “I’ve had this conversation before, I know how this is going to end and I also know I can help them.”

Andrea: Yeah. I think like you were talking about the Band-Aid on and that doesn’t really stop the bleeding. I think that’s something that I had to see that for myself in order to get over that hump because when I realized that, when I was helping people for free or for very, very little money and giving a lot of way, I realized that they weren’t taking it as seriously. They weren’t valuing it and truly doing something with it as much as people started to do once I started actually, you know, charging money.

Liz Dederer: Well, I’ll offer the lens that they were valuing it as much as you were.

Andrea: Yeah, absolutely.

Liz Dederer: That’s in the amateur energy and it’s not bad. We all have to start somewhere. No one in social media with a thousand followers, you start with nobody. Nobody starts in business with all these customers, you start with nobody. Amateur is not a negative. It just alliterative to answers, which is why I use that word because the amateur answers, the experts ask questions, you know.

Andrea: Yeah.

Liz Dederer: We don’t necessarily understand and appreciate the importance of the energy exchange of validation because it’s non quantifiable. It’s not visible and there’s not like an actual calculation for it, so we don’t see it. And we are in business for money, right? We all have to eat. It’s the resource, the tool, the evidence that we require in our modern day society.

But with the energy exchange, it’s still valuable. It’s so necessary so that when that time comes and you’re like, dress rehearsal is over, you’re totally standing as a confident and authoritative expert versus an empty suit.

Andrea: Yes. I really, really appreciate that distinction and I wonder if that, you know, sense of resentment when it starts to come up, if that might be an indication that it’s time to flip.

Liz Dederer: Yes, yes. That’s a great way to look at it. That’s definitely the moment where you can start to step into why am I not owning my expertise or my favorite question is what if? What if I did that conversation differently? What if I showed up more in my expert zone versus amateur zone? What if I started referring to myself as an expert?

Andrea: So good.

Liz Dederer: Who’s going to challenge you on that, like who’s going to challenge you on the fact that you’re an expert?

Andrea: It’s such a hard thing to get over though. I mean, it really is, and I think you’re absolutely right that the amateur really does need to have that validation, but you’re right. There comes a point when it’s just, “Maybe, I really need to do this. Maybe this really is my thing.”

Liz Dederer: Uh-hmm. I can stand in absolute confidence and go to toe-to-toe with anyone that I am hands down the best at sales. I am an expert at sales for everyone, absolutely not. I am the best at sales for the people I invested sales for. That’s how you stand and own your expert energy. You’re not _____ best across the world who ever lived ever. That’s ego, right? Expertise says I’m the best at what I specifically do for those that I specifically do it for. I am an expert in that.

Andrea: OK, so when you’re doing the Sales School for Entrepreneurs, are you helping people who are amateurs or people who are experts or people who are trying to get over that hump? How did the people know whether or not they belong in that program?

Liz Dederer: I’m helping everyone across the board. I’ve got experts in there who just aren’t necessarily using their voice. They aren’t necessarily speaking their value yet. They’re still in sales energy, fear energy because they haven’t been taught or given permission that it’s OK to serve.

Teaching amateurs for sure, who just had a great conversation with a woman yesterday who’s going to join our conversation creation challenge, which is a free Facebook group to help drum up more appointments on your calendar. And she’s at a really stage of infancy in her business, which is so exciting and she’s just so dripping and ready to learn that I was like, “Please come into this container, we’ll get your calendar booked, we’ll bump up your revenue and then when you’re ready you come play in Sales School.”

And I was like, “I don’t wanna lose you because you’re an amateur and it comes across and you’ve got so much potential.”

Andrea: Hmm, cool.

Liz Dederer: Well, what we don’t work with are people who are just in it for sales, just in it for the money, just in it for kill, don’t have integrity, are not good at what they do, that doesn’t work. The best people that we work with are those that really, really want to do good work in the world. They want to help other people. We can help them. They’re great at what they do. They want to be even better at what they do. And they’re spending so much time getting better at what they do that they’re not spending any time doing it with clients or having conversations about it. They’re just geeking out in their zone. Those are the people I want to help because they’re really mad passionate about what they do. That to me is sexy as hell.

Andrea: Alright, so the Sales School for Entrepreneurs is it like a program with a certain end date or what is the basic structure of it?

Liz Dederer: So, we do six weeks kind of cohorts. We’ve got six week cohorts that run where it’s live training. And we’re in the pilot mode. It’ll launch officially in mid 2020. So, right now, it’s the six week cohorts and then we have teaching Tuesdays and follow-up Fridays.

To just kind of put this out there, overtime, it will be, you know, your sales don’t go away. So, I don’t believe your training should either, so we will build in an extended membership component to it and it will likely look like some sort of lifetime membership. I’m still working out the details, but I’m just so crazy passionate about this and the students who are in are getting great results. But it’s, “We’re gonna get in, we’re going to retrain your brain on how you think about sales, how you have the conversation.” “You’re gonna get the scripts, the mindset, the words.” “It’s all in this container and then I’m gonna support you on our follow-up Fridays,” which are kind of the students have been calling them, you know, office hours, just kind of open coaching calls where playing your sales questions to the call. And I just coach you right on the spot.

And I’ve literally had a student bring an in process sales situation to the table. We repositioned her thinking around it and this was on a Friday, and by Tuesday she had doubled her rate with this client who was already in process and she closed it and it was done from Friday to Tuesday.

Andrea: Awesome! So, listener, if you’re wanting to get results like that, if you are thinking to yourself, Liz, sounds amazing, I would really like to work with her then follow the next step. Liz, what’s the next step?

Liz Dederer: The next step is go to a saleschoolforentrepreneurs.com and we have a waitlist in between sessions and that will trigger our team to reach out to you and have an actual conversation with a real person to see what’s going on, where are you in business, how can we meet you where you are, and support you the best. It might look like the conversation creation challenge. It might be some of our other free resources that we keep behind the scenes to get you going. It might look like jumping in early to the next, you know, cohort, but that’s kicking off.

But we’re just so mad passionate about helping people make more money because I know what it’s like to be the really busy broke entrepreneur and it’s painful, especially when you’re really good at something. And I just don’t want people to feel like that.

Andrea: Hmm. And Liz, if you had one thing that you could leave the audience with, the listener with, what sort of tip or a piece of advice would you have for somebody who really does want to have a voice of influence?

Liz Dederer: I would say to them, again the expert asks questions and the amateur answers and a voice of influence does not have to look like complete sentences. You can be crazy impactful by getting someone to think differently and that’s through the process of asking more questions and you can completely demonstrate your authority, expertise, genius influence by shifting the way someone’s thinking through really expert, intelligent questions.

Andrea: Hmm, so good. Alright, thank you so much, Liz, for joining us on the Voice of Influence podcast and sharing your voice of influence. And listener if you have interest and any of this at all, please come to the voiceofinfluence.net. We’re going to have the show notes available for you there with links to what Liz said and talked about, or go directly to her Sales School for Entrepreneurs, is that right?

Liz Dederer: Yep, saleschoolforenterpreneur.com

Andrea: Either one is just fine. So, I know that this conversation is going to make a real difference in some people’s lives. And so thank you so much, Liz.

Liz Dederer: I’m so excited. Thank you for having me!

Posted on Monday, August 19, 2019

How to Manage Your Reputation in Times of Crisis with Bill Coletti

Episode 103

Bill Coletti is the CEO & Founder of Kith, a reputation management, crisis communications and professional development expert, keynote speaker, Wall Street Journal Risk & Compliance panelist, and best-selling author of Critical Moments: The New Mindset of Reputation Management.

Bill has more than 25 years of global experience managing high-stakes crises, issues management, and media relations challenges for both Fortune 500 companies and winning global political campaigns.

In this episode, we discuss what reputation management is and what it looks like when he helps companies achieve it, the four A’s of reputation management, some of the main mistakes companies make when they attempt to manage their reputation or they enter a reputation crisis, the role transparency plays in managing a reputation crisis, the three common reactions to a reputation crisis, how to help employees at every level the actions needed to obtain an organization’s desire reputation, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today we have with us Bill Coletti who is a reputation management, crisis communications and professional development expert, keynote speaker, Wall Street Journal, Risk & Compliance panelist, and best-selling author of Critical Moments: The New Mindset of Reputation Management.

This is going to be interesting, folks. He has more than 25 years of global experience managing high-stakes crises, issues management, and media relations challenges for both fortune 500 companies and winning global political campaigns, which is interesting. Bill is the CEO and founder of Kith.

Andrea: Bill, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Bill Coletti: Andrea, it is my pleasure to be here and I’m looking forward to a great conversation.

Andrea: Yeah. OK, so what is Reputation Management and what does it look like when you’re actually helping companies or individuals achieve it?

Bill Coletti: So, the beginning part of what we do at Kith is primarily crisis communications and crisis response. A company finds themselves misaligned with public expectations. And so think of United Airlines relative to the gentleman that they dragged off the plane or a credit card company or a bank that’s had a data breach, or a healthcare provider that is in the midst of litigation or some sort of lawsuit that’s there.

So, it’s a company that has somehow found themselves in the public eye and they’re misaligned with what the people expected them to do. The pivot to that is reputation management is that how do you control and how do you manage this very, very intangible asset of a corporate reputation. And we’ve introduced this concept of the 4As to allow corporations actually the ability to manage that.

So, we come in the door typically through crisis when companies find themselves misaligned and then we continue the relationship in this construct of, well, a “we don’t want to have to ever go through that again and how do we build a reservoir of goodwill,” or “We want to avoid that overall and never would sort of want to experience that again, but never for the first time.” And “How do we use reputation management as a means to sort of grow the benefit of the doubt if something would to happen to us?”

Andrea: Hmm. So, you just mentioned your 4As, would you like to kind of go into that a little bit?

Bill Coletti: Yeah. So, there’s this concept that a lot of people may be familiar with in marketing called the 4Ps of marketing, it’s Price, Product, Place, Promotion. It’s a pretty, you know, 1960s generation of thinking. And so, I was sitting with a client in New York, we had just finished a crisis engagement. They were through it and we’re now in the process of recovery after this crisis. They had been subject to, you know, pretty withering media coverage for about 10 days and then we sort of found a solution and move forward.

And I was sitting with the CEO and the CEO said, “OK, I’ve heard you talk about reputation management before. What do you mean? What are you talking about?” And so I tried to explain the concepts behind how we can try to get ahead of these issues that may impact our company moving forward.

And I was explaining it before I had developed the 4As and he said, “Oh, you mean like the 4Ps of marketing, price, product, place promotion,” because prior to that there was no such thing. What it created was a structure for companies actually to assign resources as well as headcount to solve a marketing problem. So you had someone responsible for price, for product, for placement and promotion.

And so the 4As that came out of that conversation, when I realized that most people think about the 4Ps, was to articulate this concept of what are the 4As. And what I came up with is the structure of it begins with awareness. Companies have to be aware of who they are, aware of their marketplace and to have a sense of sort of self-awareness much like we would to talk about in a human development context.

So, the first level is Awareness. Can we pull it off? How do we think about ourselves? The second step is this notion of Assessment, which is asking others, both, asking your employees internally, asking stakeholders externally, asking your customers, asking regulators, and asking others that influenced your corporation. So the first step is very much personal self-awareness, looking inside your company. The second step is asking and having ongoing assessment of how we do and where do we stand in the context of reputation.

Then the third A is Authority. And with authority is, is that once you’re self-aware and understand what your corporation has the capacity to do, you then understand what the public and your stakeholders expect of you. You can then get authority and give yourself permission, the company permission to actually begin the process of developing reputation management initiatives.

And that authority certainly comes from senior leadership buy-in; it comes from asset allocation budget in order to execute it and then probably headcount in order to do that. And so you need the authority from the organization to do it because too often CEOs and leaders that I work with sort of think about this as, “Oh yeah, yeah, that’s nice. Let’s just write a bigger check to the United Way or let’s just write a bigger check to some organization.”

And so this notion of authority is you got to get buy-in from your leadership, but you also have to then make sure that you have more than buy-in, but actually budget and resources and whatnot. And then in the model there is a hard blue line on top of those three things. So from awareness, assessment, to authority and that hard blue line is to stop you from going to the final, the fourth A, which is Action.

Because too often consultants, PR firms, and myself 10 years ago would immediately run to action and say, “Well, you need to do this that’s the other thing.” “You need to have a big sustainability program, you need to be able to talk about all the great things you’re doing for your employees.” But if you’ve not gone through that journey and you jumped to action, and that’s why I put that a blue line separating the third step in the fourth step, is that the action is foolish. It’s foolhardy.

And so, Andrea, I’m sure in the work that you do with your clients is that you’ve got folks and individuals that want to just immediately jump to action and don’t want to do the assessment. They don’t want to be self-aware and they don’t want to give themselves permission to actually change. And so, I think that that notion of don’t immediately jump to action, but let’s go through a little bit of a journey in order to turn the corner sort of resonate. So, it works in a human context, but it also works in a corporate context.

Andrea: Hmm, definitely. There’s always a need for truly looking for the actual problem that’s there and finding the real solution before moving forward. So, you said that one of the things that leaders tend to do is write a big check right away instead of really taking care of this in a sustainable kind of way. What would be one of the biggest mistakes that you see leaders making sort of immediately when a crisis comes up?

Bill Coletti: Yeah. So two separate things, there’s in the crisis when the crisis comes up is one way a leader shows up. And then the second way the leader shows up is actually how do they sort of develop reputation management. And so the writing a big check is in the context of reputation management. One of the biggest mistakes that I see companies make in a reputation management context is that this is easy, that you can get away with a tactic or a set of tactics and that could be write a big check or have an employee townhome meeting or, you know, do something that is good for the LBGTQ community or something like that. It’s not one off, because people form opinions based on constant interaction with corporations over a long time.

So, the greatest challenge that I see companies take is that they’re looking for the silver bullet, the one thing that can kind of bring about that change from a reputation standpoint. In a crisis, I think what I see, and it’s almost the polar opposite, where people tried to be too thoughtful for too long in a crisis while Rome is burning and stakeholders, the media and others are frustrated, you have to fill the vacuum with information as fast as you can. So, there’s actually a polar opposite sort of in crisis. You have a set of behaviors and then reputation management. You have a set of behaviors and they’re almost at opposite ends of the perspective.

Andrea: I know that one of the things that you talked about as seven levers that companies need to manage or to grow their reputations and that first one is transparency. When it comes to that moment of crisis, some things, you know, are not going as planned. There’s that misalignment with what people expect. Maybe a lot of people inside or outside of the company do not understand what’s really going on, how much transparency is necessary on the front end at the very beginning to fill that vacuum?

Bill Coletti: Yeah. You know, transparency is directly related to authenticity and these are all sort of jargony buzzwords that we all sort of toss around that’s there. And so if transparency in a crisis, it’s critical. And transparency relates to authenticity. So, for a preventable risk, something that has happened to accompany that there simply should be a zero tolerance support.

So, a meat company, a producer of ground beef or any meat and there are metal shavings in the ground beef, there should be zero tolerance for that. That is absolutely preventable with the right amount of resources and the right amount of technology that can be avoided. When that happens, the transparency comes in. You simply have to apologize, fix it, and get back to normal as fast as you can. And that’s where transparency comes in, is that “We’re sorry we made a mistake.” “Here’s what happened.” “Here’s what we’re doing to fix it and here’s how we’re going to get back to normal to try to earn your trust.” And so that is very transparent.

That was not the typical response probably 10 to 20 years ago. That was not the typical response. Typical response was, “Let’s hope nobody finds out and sort of bury our head a little bit and we’ll just sort of fix the problem in a small scale way.” “We’ll recall the product and move forward.” I think the risk of getting kind of caught, if you will, is greater than the risk of transparency. I think in a reputation context to people that are transparent; they gravitate to companies that are transparent, that are good to do business with, that are honest and open partners.

And so that’s the context of transparency. It’s not oddly cathartic where every thought and feeling you have is broadcast on social media. That’s not what I mean. That’s kind of weird. We all have kind of friends like that on Facebook. That’s not what I’m talking about, but I’m talking about that companies do business in a way that is open and fair dealing and people are comforted by that. While they might not be interested in it, they’re at least comforted by it.

Andrea: I’m thinking of some situations that I’ve seen before where maybe a leader, I’m just taking this little step further, where there might be a leadership change at the top and people are wondering what’s going on or why, how much of that information, and it could be in a crisis situation, but how much of that information should people know, you know, employees or the public depending on how involved the public is with a particular leader. Sometimes leaders have a very charismatic presence, so people are drawn to them and want to stick by them and that sort of thing. How does a company deal with that sort of, I don’t know that attention, I guess, between how much do we share and how much do we not?

Bill Coletti: Sure, and this is hypothetical, is it a sudden transition or is it a planned transition?

Andrea: Probably sudden, yeah.

Bill Coletti: Yeah, sudden. So, I think we’re acutely seeing that in the context of MeToo. I think we’ve seen a number of men particularly in leadership roles that are now no longer in leadership roles. So it has been very, very sudden and these have been, you know, popular people, popular certainly within their small subset of their company. But some people we’ve seen, you know, have been popular in a pop culture context. The old adage and the old line that we’ve all seen a hundred times is that, you know, “Mr. X has decided to spend more time with his family.” And that’s almost become kind of code for, “There’s something going on. We don’t want to tell you about.”

And so I think that there are legal tensions. We can’t call somebody out that said, “You know, Mr. X is no longer here because of these following transgressions.” There’s disparaging clauses and there are all kinds of negotiated contracts that are there. I think companies don’t really care or individuals, they’re curious about why this happened. But I think what they really need to hear is from the new leader that said “What happened, happened,” but here transparently is how we are going to get better moving forward.”

So, sort of the People Magazine view of “Oh my gosh, what happened, give me the inside scoop?” We’re all interested in that. We’re all curious about it. But I think scratching that itch is not very necessary. I think the transparency comes in about the path forward and acknowledging that we’re in a situation of change, acknowledging it’s a change that we didn’t want to be in but it is a place that we’re going to get through and that’s where the transparency comes in. It’s less about the voyeuristic, you know, who shot John or what happened in the events. That open up to a litigation and legal risk, which is really unnecessary, and it’s frankly unfair to someone who’s going through a pretty bad, difficult situation to begin with.

Andrea: OK, so you’ve been in the room with a number of people who are in the middle of crisis and a team dynamics. You see these team dynamics sort of at play. What is it like for you to walk into a room and try to assess where everybody’s at or how to meet people where they’re at, what are those team dynamics like? What do you see when you move into a crisis situation with the leadership team?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, it’s a great question, terrific question. So, typical engagement starts with someone from the company where their head of communications to CEO, board member of general council calls and has an initial conversation and they say, “Here’s where we are and my ears are wide open from that moment forward.” And that usually one person, maybe two people on the call and they’re all sort of sharing their perspectives. From then, I’m really sort of taking mental notes of how is this information getting flowed to me. What’s missing? What are people hiding? What do they not want to tell?

And it’s usually in that first call, we’ve not really been engaged but we’re pretty close to being engaged because a lot of our business comes from referrals, where people find themselves in crisis. They do an initial call to make sure that I’m legit and then it moves to the next meeting, which is more than likely means, I jump on a plane in that afternoon and the next morning, we all gathered together and meet as a team.

There is a handful of different leadership responsibilities when I walk in. So, there’s typically somebody from legal, typically somebody from operations, someone who actually does the work of whatever the enterprise does, someone from communications and then an executive leader. And all four of those career choices, if you decide to be a lawyer or if you decide to do business or in business operations and, actually sort of do the work versus communications versus executive.

So, I have a gross general perception of those types of four archetypes just based on the career choices that I’ve made is that, you know, the communicators typically are looking for the silver lining and are looking for sort of the positive constructs that are there. I think the general council are looking at the worst case scenario, you know, “What could go wrong?” I think the people in operations are like, “What are you worried about, this is really normal.” “Something broke. We’re going to fix it and, we’re going to get back to business.” The big wild card is the CEO, the leadership team that’s there and it really depends on their leadership archetype. You know, who are they, where do they come from?

I believe in the adage that the crucible of crisis doesn’t develop your leadership, it reveals it. And so I think when we see ourselves in situations, I really, really, really quickly try to size up the CEO. I’ve recently used, I know you’re a fan of sort of the Sally Hogshead stuff and there’s a Gallup’s StrengthFinders, while we certainly don’t have time to do any sort of, you know, an assessment in a real time situation like that is that I do try to use some sort of paradigm archetype to quickly sort people because it just sort of helps me interact with them.

Because what I did earlier in my career was I would just sort of walk in and say “I’m in charge, here’s what we’re doing, step 1, step 2, step 3.” And that will work in a fire. You know, if you’re in a fire, you don’t really care about the personality of the firefighter, you just want to be told what to do and how to get out safely and you want them to fight the fire. But if it’s smoldering or not actively burning, if you will, that’s when it’s really beneficial. And that’s where I found great benefit of sort of understanding the dynamics of the individuals in the room.

But there are times where you just got to go in and say, “Here’s what we’re going to do and we’ll deal with the casualties kind of afterwards.” It’s there. I don’t know if that directly answered your question, but as it develops, I try to look at some sort of personality traits or some sort of paradigm to help sort people because that’s really, really valuable to let me empathize. But also, let me sort of, you know, lead with passion and cajole people into doing things that they might not necessarily want to do.

Andrea: Hmm. And I really think that when you have a voice of influence, you are trying to meet people where they are, not just trying to bring them to where you are. And so that’s sounds to me like sort of the epitome of that, like trying to figure out where are they and how can I meet them there. That seems very, very important.

Bill Coletti: It is, but it’s time-bound. And I would ask you as you’re imagining situations like that and the people that you serve and you’re trying to help them, it’s usually in a committee meeting as they are planning the next event and it’s a little bit slower paced as opposed to something like this. So, I’ve got to cheat the process. I’ve got to short circuit things in order to do that. I’m glad to hear you say yes. That it is different than if I’m meeting with my team to perform our quarterly task or an annual, you know, major goal that we have versus, you know, “We’ve got to get back to a reporter by 4 o’clock and I don’t even have any idea what happened.” Those are two different paradigms.

Andrea: Hmm, definitely. Have you always been good in a crisis? How did you know that this was, you know, your thing?

Bill Coletti: Yeah. I don’t know about always. I always try to improve and get better at it. I think I have had a leadership trait and I’ve always used that and from elementary and middle school and manifested itself in student government and things like that. I sail and I enjoy sailing and they say that sailing is, you know, hours of boredom with moments of stark terror. And I tried to stay calm in those situations, so I don’t know about always. I think the stakes are a little bit different when you’re in sixth grade versus now. But I don’t recall having big shifts or swings of panic or concern and my dad is amazing 95 years old and still alive.

You know, I’ve watched him and he has a little bit of a higher drama panic meter than I do. So, it has been really nice to watch that and try to do the opposite of it. Not in a disparaging way, but just try to craft myself and to craft the way I show up in a little bit of a different way than the way I’ve seen it. So, I manifest with him in our sailing that we did as a family.

Andrea: Sure. I think there’s a little bit of that some people just kind of tend to shut down in a crisis, others really kind of dial up. It’s almost like the spidey senses turn on and so I was just kind of curious, I assume that that’s kind of how it goes for you.

Bill Coletti: Well, I would add in so typical is that third is just panic. One is that spidey sense is awesome. I want people in the room that are intuitive see things and have centers of influence where they can learn really well. So, there’s the shutdown, which is, “Oh my God, this is the worst thing ever.” And we never hear from them again, the spidey sense folks in the middle love that analogy. But there are also folks that just chicken a little and are freaking out in every little thing and those two extremes have very little use. And there are subcategories underneath that. But I think you hit on something with those two and then we add the third. But I think those are the three general ways I see people show up.

Andrea: Yeah, yeah. What foundational things do you think that companies should do or provide to really ensure that whatever the reputation is that they’re trying to establish, that it actually reaches the frontline employee in service or sales. The people that are actually, you know, face to face with customers, how do you hope that reach all the way down?

Bill Coletti: Yeah, so a clear and simple articulation of mission and values. What do we stand for as a company? And that is most personified by the voice of the CEO. And so, I think getting CEO voice right and then once you get it and you think you got it right repeat it over and over and over again so that that line employee simply gets it. But more importantly, the manager of that line employee really, really gets it. And that people are empowered for reputation management standpoint to make smart decisions not simply follow the rules that are there.

And so, there’s a famous marine corps general named, Krulak, and Krulak articulated the concept of the strategic corporal. And basically what that is, is that his theory was that the frontline of the marines at the actual front have more impact on American foreign policy than any policy or strategy decision that’s made. That frontline person shows up like a jerk that is going to have more impact on what we do.

So, Krulak’s law, pushing that down into the organization and the concept of the strategic corporal is, it’s one thing for the counter clerk at McDonald’s, which is the equivalent of, you know, the fighting marine on the grunt, if you will, on the very front line. What you need is, yes, frontline is important, but what you really need is that strategic corporal or that store manager for them to really get it. That’s what really, really critical.

And I don’t want to disparage the frontline because I think we’ve all been there and in that early first jobs that we’ve had, but I think the way that that gets pushed down is mission and values articulated by the leadership, by the CEO specifically, but then for that strategic corporal, that person at the second round, if you will, having them have it dialed in is sort of the best way to push it down to the organization. It’s not a memo, a webinar, or a podcast or anything like that. It is the embodiment of that in the individuals that are the strategic corporal at the frontline.

Andrea: Great! Thank you so much, Bill. How can the listener find you? Where should they go to find your book, Critical Moments?

Bill Coletti: Awesome! Well, kith.ceo is the website of our firm. I’m really active on LinkedIn. I try to publish some content weekly about crisis and reputation management on LinkedIn. So, those are two really good places and then I’m just kind of old fashioned email, bcoletti@kith.ceo. So, our website is the great portal to find us. LinkedIn is a great resource and I read emails still.

Andrea: Great! And we will certainly put all of that in the show notes. Any last words that you would want to share with leaders who are wanting to have a voice of influence in time of crisis?

Bill Coletti: I think to kind of really do what you suggest, learn who you are as an individual and play your strengths. Not everyone has to be good in a crisis because we need players in the B team, the second round. And I don’t mean that B is less than A, but I think the important thing is that when you show up in a crisis, understand what your strengths are and understand how you react. I think the simplest, best advice I give folks that find themselves in corporations to do this is read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times and just say, “If that had happened to us, how would we react?”

So, if companies or if individuals do that and maybe a brown bag lunch type of thing and say, “Hey guys, if this had happened to us, here’s an article.” “If this had happened to us, what would we do?” Simple best actionable advice that’s there after that, get to know yourself and know how you’re going to show up because that notion of the crucible of crisis doesn’t develop your leadership, it reveals it. And so you want to like what you see when it gets revealed.

Andrea: Great! Thank you so much for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

Bill Coletti: Thank you very much!

Posted on Monday, August 12, 2019

How to Unite Your Team With An Anthem

Episode 102

It should be a goal of every corporate leader to get their employees to buy into the company’s mission and brand. Yet, the further you get down the line, the more difficult it becomes to do that. You end up with people who don’t feel like they have a purpose within the organization and then they’re there just for the paycheck.

In this episode, I explain how you can help your employees feel like they have a purpose and a voice within your organization by creating and utilizing a team anthem specifically for your customer service team. I also explain what a team anthem is, the three reasons we utilize team anthems with our clients, how to create your team anthem, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Fascinate Assessment

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. One of the things that we often talk to people about is brand awareness and the opportunity that people on, sometimes, the frontlines or throughout the company have to be able to truly represent and embody their brand.

That is something that leaders usually want. They want everybody in the company to be on board and buy into the mission, the vision, and the values of the company. And yet, it’s very easy, the further you get down the line in terms of seniority to end up with people who feel less than excited about the brand, less than committed to the company and the company’s success where it might just feel like a job. It just feels like a job to them that they want to maintain to get paycheck, which is a legitimate reason to have a job.

But there’s something significantly missing when there are people in your company who work at your job just to have a job, something significantly missing for them and for you.

One of the most important things for us to remember when you are a leader is that the people around you want to know that they have a purpose. They want to know that their voice matters. If their voice doesn’t matter within the company or with your customers then it’s just a job. However, if they find purpose and meaning and believe that their voice really does matter then they’re going to have a different level of investment into the success of the mission and vision and values of the company.

One of the things that we do is work with individuals on their own voice of influence, so helping people to really believe that their voice does matter to find their authentic voice so that they can make a difference. So that their advice can be _____, so that their expertise can be accepted and utilized, and so that their leadership can be followed.

When people are searching for their voice of influence, one of the tools that we utilize is the Fascinate Assessment in order to be able to help people kind of understand how the world sees them, how they are perceived by others. It is a fairly simple assessment, which is what I love about it because I love the really in depth stuff but at scale. In depth is very difficult to apply and utilize fully.

The Fascinate Assessment has just enough meat on the bones that it can really make a significant impact. But it’s also simple enough that people can take it real quick and then have some results right away and come up with what they call a personal brand anthem, something that would help them to remember what their purpose is. And so this is an assessment that we use and I love the terminology, the anthem.

So, we have applied this idea of having an anthem to the importance of having one as a team. A personal anthem would be based on your personal purpose. The things that you’re particularly good at or what you bring to the table that is significant and that others need to know about how other people really see you when you’re at your best, but what about the team as a whole?

A lot of times companies have, you know, values and mission statements and things are super important to the DNA of the company and you want to maintain that throughout every bit of the company. But what about teams? You know, sometimes a team needs to have their own sense of identity. Why does our team in particular matter?

And it’s interesting, but customer service can tend to feel like it sort of everybody wants to be important. Everybody wants the customer experience to be good, but at the same time it has historically been sort of these are the people that are taking care of the hard stuff and they’re dealing with the hard conversations. They’re just cleaning up the messes and that sort of thing.

The problem with that is that if you are hiring people to participate in customer service and you want them to do a good job, then you’re trying to hire people that care. You’re trying to hire people that would be good with people and that sort of thing. Those are all very important things.

But if they don’t have a personal connection to the purpose, to the vision, to the mission of the company, if they don’t see how they fit in as a team, as a customer service team that matters to the bottom line, that matters to the leadership of the company, if they don’t feel like they really matter, then whether they mean to or not, whether you mean to or not, they’re going to end up feeling as though they don’t really matter.

I’ve spoken with a number of managers or customer service teams or call centers who feel as though the bigger company and the leadership of the company doesn’t respect the fact that their frontline customer service people need to understand what’s going on in the company.

So when there is a strategic initiative that starts or when marketing is going to take a turn or a new product is going to come into play, many times the customer service team is the last one to know about these changes, which is unfortunate because they’re often the one place that customers actually have contact with the company itself.

One of the very first or most important voices of your company is your customer service team. And if they don’t sense that from you, if they’re not getting that sense or they’re not truly connected to the bigger purpose, mission, vision of the company then it becomes more difficult for them to really truly embody it and represent your company well.

So, today we’re going to talk a little bit about creating a team anthem for your customer service team. Why we do this? Why is this a piece of what we help companies to do and how can you do it for yourself? So we’re going to start here with an anthem.

So an anthem, let’s think about this in terms of a national anthem. So the United States National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner is played on a regular basis at ball games and sporting events and political gatherings and all kinds of places that is played on a regular basis. Why is that and what is it about an anthem that is so important?

Well, we got three things here. So first of all, an anthem is really, really important for providing perspective. When an anthem is played before a competition, there is a sense of we are all together under this anthem, under this one nation and we are a part of this bigger story.

There is perspective to be gained when we take a step back and say, “Wait a second, this is what we’re all about. This is where we came from. This is where we’re headed, this is what we stand for,” that sort of thing. So, having perspective and understanding that in the moment of the fight, in the moment of that point of a competition where things get really intense prior to that you’ve said that moment is important. But overall we’re on the same team. And when we can say that, then those little moments though they might be intense and people might fight really hard to come out the winner. That’s great.

But bringing that sense of perspective allows people to remember that they’re really a part of something bigger than themselves. And this is not just about me and winning this competition, but who we are as a people and where we come from is really important. And that we don’t have to compete on that in particular. The anthem reminds athletes who and what they’re actually representing. This is about something bigger than ourselves.

So, when we offer people an anthem, when they have an anthem to rally around, then that helps them to gain a perspective about what we’re all about, where we come from and the fact that this is about a bigger story, this is about more than me, “I am not the only piece of this puzzle that matters, but I am a piece of the puzzle that does matter.”

And that brings us to point number two. A good anthem calls out our identity. Who do we say that we are as a people, as a company, as a nation, who do we say that we are? In the United States National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, at the very end you hear a very clear “This is who we are. We are the land of the free, so we are free and we are a home of the brave.”

So, this is where you can really find a place when you are brave. You are brave and you are free and that piece of identity at the end of the national anthem, every time it is sung, every time a whole huge crowd or every time that we hear “The land of the free and the home of the brave” and that is belted out at the end and we all rally around that sound, those words. It’s an amazing opportunity for people to f to be reminded of their identity and who we are. This is important. I am important. I can be brave and I am free.

Then finally number three an anthem provides, I don’t know if you’d call it motivation or really a sense of purpose. So perspective and identity and purpose, they all sort of come together. They come together to help people to feel like they know, “OK this is what we’re all about. This is where we come from, this is what we’re all about and this is what I’m here to provide. This is how I show up. I show up as brave, I show up as free, I show up with respect that sort of thing.

So when a company adapts this idea of having an anthem, a good anthem is going to provide those three things; it’s perspective, a sense of identity, and a very clear purpose. This is where we come from. This is who we say we are and this is what we say we’re all about an anthem, for even a team like a customer service team is going to bring all those three things to bear. It is going to make sure that those three things are hit on so that the team can rally around this anthem and have that sense of identity and perspective and purpose.

But what happens when there’s an anthem and there is a sense of discrepancy between what the anthem says and what people are seeing in their company or in their country. When they see an anthem, when they’re hearing an anthem and they hear these words like respectful invitation or, you know, freedom and bravery and these values or these words that really call out something really beautiful and important and purposeful. And then they look at the company or they look at the country and they say, “But that’s not what I’m seeing here. I’m seeing a discrepancy between who we say that we are and what we’re actually doing.”

You’ve probably been quite aware of some of the controversial ways that the anthem in particular of the United States National Anthem has been used to discuss this and bring up conversation about the discrepancy that athletes are seeing between the anthem itself and what they’re seeing in the way that it plays out for equality. And the way that some of these people have chosen to address this or to bring this discrepancy to light is to kneel during the anthem instead of stand, which is an interesting way to do it.

There are lots of different perspectives on this and having had grandparents or relatives that have served in the military almost giving their lives or giving their lives for the country, I can understand the depth of intense feelings that people have around this issue. And yet I think it’s important that we always look at, especially for if you’re going to have a voice of influence, you going to be able to take perspective. You got to be able to look at the way that other people are seeing the world as well.

So, why would somebody kneel during the national anthem? Is it possible that they actually do respect the national anthem and they respect the many ways that people have contributed or sacrificed for the freedoms in the country so much that they see that there’s a need to do it even better. They see discrepancies between that freedom that we proclaim in the national anthem that people have fought for and what they’re actually seeing in real life. And this is a way that they are choosing to bring this to light.

So the point for a company is that there are going to be times that even if you do create an anthem or if you have a set of values that you say, you know, on a big scale mission, vision, values for the company. And those get down to the people who are on those front lines that you get down to the customer service folks and they look around and they say, “Yeah, but I’m not seeing that here and I’m not seeing that here.”

How would you like them to handle the discrepancies that they see? Do they have an opportunity to share their voice, to help make the communication or the anthem that of the company actually get everybody aligned underneath of it so that it’s not saying something that’s not true about your company because if values aren’t aspirational, I don’t know what they are.

Obviously, they’re not going to be perfect in a sense an anthem should be calling out what’s already present, the strengths that are already there in your company or in your customer service team or in you as an individual. But if people are seeing discrepancies, they should see discrepancies. What should they do with those discrepancies? What do you want them to do about it? Do they have the opportunity to really voice their concerns and make a difference? Does their voice matter?

So, as you’re thinking about an anthem and giving people an anthem, it’s not something that you actually create for other people. Instead, it works so much better if a team gets together to create their own anthem because then they do have a voice. When you do have that company mission, vision, values and then try to get it to filter out through the whole company; different sites, different divisions, different teams, it’s good to have all that but it’s even better when a team can come underneath of that and in alignment with what you’ve already created be able to get even more specific about who they are as a team and who they are as an individual.

When they do that, you’re going to find that the people, the individuals have a clear sense of what they bring to the table, their own sense of perspective, identity and purpose and that they see how that connects with their teams sense of perspective, identity and purpose and then they see how their team fits into the strategic mission, vision, and values of the company then things feel more aligned.

People don’t see as many discrepancies or when they do, they have a better sense of what to do with those discrepancies when they come up. So as for the technical pieces of an anthem besides this general sense of perspective, identity and purpose, how do you do that? What process can you go through to take your people through this opportunity to find an anthem for your team?

There are different ways that you can do this. There are different people that have different systems that give you one word or give you a set of values or give you whatever. There are lots of different ways that you could do this. And the basic concept is that you want them to be very, very clear on the perspective, identity and purpose.

The way that we do it with companies when we do a voice of influence program for like a customer service team or a sales team is we go in and we identify the strengths of the team itself. People take the fascinate assessment and we give people the opportunity to create their own anthem and then from there, their own anthem in the Fascinate Assessment is like an adjective and a noun. It’s what you do best and how you do it.

So for example, empowering expression is one of the pieces of my personal anthem. So when I walk into a room, I’m thinking to myself, “This is what I bring to the table. I bring empowering expression. This is the perspective that I have. This is where I come from. I know in my own mind and heart just the background of why that’s important to me and what I’ve done to be able to get to the point where I can actually help people with that. I know that’s my identity. This is who I am, this is what I provide. But it’s also my purpose.”

I can help people by helping them be able to express themselves. And when I have that as my main mission, when that becomes the goal then most other things tend to fall into place because I’m very, very focused on what I can bring to the table. I’m very, very focused on my anthem.

When it comes to with voice of influence, and our anthem is Voice of Influence, what we have chosen to do is to take that same model, the adjective and the noun and create four or five different adjectives, noun phrases that would describe different pieces of who we say that we are and what we’re all about. And by doing that then we use a one sentence to describe that to make it very clear and then we use a question to ask, “Are we really doing that? How does this actually play out? Is this a thing that we can actually do? Are we doing it well?”

And so that is the basic format of the team anthem that we help teams create. You can do that on your own or if you need help with that, we could certainly help. But that is so important for people to be able to come together to create this together. And once you have an anthem, you can utilize the anthem to create a system of checks and balances to create a system of accountability if you’d like to incorporate it into your personal reviews, personal reviews for the person.

If culture and tribe and getting everybody together to be aligned with that mission, vision, and values of your company is important to you then spending time on an anthem, spending time on giving people a voice, helping people to find their own voice and to be able to connect it to the voice of your company is so worth it. Because in the end you’re going to get more buy-in and you’re going to get more engagement.

When people really feel like they understand the perspective of what this company is about, where they came from, what your company says that they are, who they are and who they are as a team within the company and then their purpose. When they know that your purpose and their purpose are connected, they’re going to be motivated to be able to do more and really truly embody the brand of your company.

If you’d like any more information about creating an anthem, you can find more information on our show notes at voiceofinfluence.net/99 and folks that means that next time it will be Episode 100 for the Voice of Influence podcast and we are celebrating here on our team. We’re very excited about Episode 100. So in that episode, I’m going to be back again to share with you what we have distilled over the past two years, two plus years of interviews and working with clients, working with individuals on their voice of influence. What are the six main elements of a Voice of Influence? Why are they so important?

Clarity around these things changes the game. When you are wanting to a difference, you need to know the six elements for yourself and for helping your team know these six elements for themselves. If you’re looking for emerging leaders to come up and come up the ranks in your company, this episode is for you. You’re going to want to hear it. We’re excited to share it with you next time and until then, until Episode 100. Go and find an anthem for your team and go make your voice matter more.

Posted on Monday, August 5, 2019

Four Imperatives for Successful Managers with Ron Carucci

Episode 101

Ron Carucci is a co-founder and managing partner at Navalent where he works with CEO’s and executives who are pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. Ron has a thirty-year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization, and leadership. He has been featured in many business publications including The Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

In this episode, Ron shares what first got him interested in topics like influence and leadership, the shocking statistic of how many people aiming for leadership positions fail within the first 18 months, the four traits his study revealed that all people who succeeded in becoming influential leaders in their organizations had in common, what his research showed about the connection between honesty and being an influential leader, how his company helps organizations diagnose and correct the issues within them, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea. Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Ron Carucci who is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He has a 30-year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership all over the world. He’s been featured in many business publications, including the Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

Andrea: Ron, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Ron Carucci: Hey, Andrea, good to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Andrea: All right. So your body of work is just a great fit for our audience, so we have a lot that we could talk about. It will be fun to see where this conversation goes today. To begin with, what kind of got you interested in the areas of influence and power and honesty and leadership in general?

Ron Carucci: Well, it certainly wasn’t looking around and seeing how well those things are going in the other parts of the world. I think we’re all discouraged when we look around and see the degree to which influence and power are being used in ways that caused far more harm than good. But it was personal.

Probably about maybe just under a decade ago, we were working with a client in one of our sort of very beefy, transformational products. As is always the case, a young leader distinguished himself in that project. When it was over and people were ready to be reassigned to bigger jobs and newer roles in the new organization design we had finished, he was given a chance to take on a much bigger opportunity. Of course, nobody was surprised and everybody assumed he would thrive.

In about nine months into that assignment, he called me. When I saw him in my caller ID I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, he’s calling to check in and say hi, give me a great progress update and all the great things they’ve accomplished since we finished.” But he was calling to tell me he’d been fired and that he was looking for help networking another opportunity.

I was shocked. I just couldn’t imagine how could that possibly have happened. He was on top of every nine-box, eight-box, six-box high potential career property list.

A couple of hours later, the CEO, who had been our client, called also to tell me they had to let him go and he was a little bit perturbed and more than subtly _____ that similar responsibility for his failure was mine for not having better prepared him which, of course, to anybody in this field it’s devastating to hear that somebody is laying the failure of a great, otherwise promising, leader at your feet.

Andrea: Oh yeah.

Ron Carucci: So I said, “Can we come in? Can I come sniff around? I mean, I just want to, on my own dime here, understand how could we all have so badly misjudged his opportunity and talent and potential and find out what could have gone wrong here,” because I was just baffled.

So we went in and that short investigation is what led us to our 10-year longitudinal study with more than 2,700 leaders. And, Andrea, only to discover that he was just one more statistic that we’ve known for decades, that more than half of people in his position, leading from the middle of an organization trying to enter the top, more than half of them, maybe 50 to 60 percent of them, fail in their first 18 months.

And I thought, “How is this acceptable? How is this appropriately okay that we just continue to take otherwise very promising people and send them off a cliff?” So I was like, “We’re going to turn over every single rock we can find to uncover every landmine being put in these people’s way and expose them to find out how do we prevent this carnage.”

Of course, all the recruiters love it because it’s an annuity for them, but we just felt like we can do better. The great part of the research was that we thought, “Well, okay. So if 50 to 60 percent of them are failing, what are the other 40 to 50 percent of them doing that are sticking the landing, that are arriving at higher altitudes and thriving in these more complex, more ambiguous purchase? How are they doing it?”

We were able to, in fact, extrapolate very consistent patterns in that population of people that set them apart and allowed them to be influential and successful for more difficult places.

Andrea: Well, that’s so exciting. What kinds of things did you find that helped them to be more influential and successful?

Ron Carucci: There were four. The interesting thing about these patterns, my research team got a little bit frustrated because I made them do 99 different regression analyses to keep looking at the data because they kept coming back, no matter how we cut the data up and sorted it, these four patterns, in some form or other, were the top of the list. And if any of them were not included, it put the leaders in the failure group.

What that meant was you had to be good at all of them or you were in the failure group. And I didn’t want to have to write that. I wanted to be able to say, “Three or four will be fine and you can learn the fourth,” but that’s not how…

So I tell people think of this as one thing with four parts.

Andrea: There you go.

Ron Carucci: Not four things because, while they can be somewhat isolated to develop them, the reality was that all of them are what’s required to succeed.

The first one was context. These were the leaders that could come in and read the tea leaves around them. They were curious. They asked hard questions. They wondered about the environment around them and they recognized that, for them to be influential, they had to adapt as much to their environment as they had to impose change on it. Too many leaders come into situations to be influential looking to impose an answer that they already had.

It’s interesting, Andrea, we do this to leaders on their way in. During the selection process, we say things to people like, “Hey, look at these great brands you’ve built. That’s what we need.” Or, “Oh, my gosh, you’ve had such success leading sales forces. That’s exactly what we’re looking for here.”

And in those statements, we’re setting those people up to fail because what we’re telling them is, “You have a recipe. You have a formula. And we’d like you to repeat that formula when you come here.” What they think is that they just have to go reach back to past success and slap it on formulaically to the environment they’re on without even adapting it or thinking about the context.

So this mythical mandate creates this contextual blindness in people, and it happens every day. We all see it. Of course the harder they slap, the more receptive _____ becomes and the people begin to back away. We’ve all seen the movie when somebody comes in and of course we all hear the famous last words, “Oh, they weren’t a good fit.”

Andrea: Right. It seems like there is an expectation of new leaders to be solid and not movable. But what you’re saying is that they should be moveable. They should be adaptable. There should be some adaptability in what they do.

Ron Carucci: Not ‘should be’, Andrea. There has to be.

Andrea: Yes.

Ron Carucci: How could you… there’s no one-size-fits-all. No matter how good you’ve been in your past, no matter how much talent you have, there’s no way that anything you can do is Plug and Play. So you have to walk into the environment assuming that you don’t have to go native. You don’t have to completely go native into the landscape and be like everybody else, because then your ability to create change is a little off.

But you have to adapt enough to build credibility with people, that they know you didn’t come to fix them or change them, that you came and that you’re willing to have them fingerprint you as much as you’re willing to fingerprint them.

Andrea: Absolutely. I love that so much. I really, really do. I love that.

Ron Carucci: The second one was breadth. Breadth, these are the people that they grew up in finance, they grew up in marketing, they grew up in some discipline, but they no longer have the luxury of seeing the world through that lens.

So, if you came up through finance, you can’t see the world economically. If you came up through marketing, you can see the world through consumers and customer analytics.

Breadth means you understand that the best parts of an organization happen at the seams. And that organizations naturally fragment, so you have silos, you have cliques, you have groups, you have regions, you have affinity to localization. And your job is now to stitch those seams. Your job is now to build bridges. Your job is now to create connection among people and to create traffic patterns that bring people together to create more cohesion in your organization, not intensify fragmentation.

These are the leaders that could build bridges. These are the leaders that could cross borders in organizations, that could bring people together, that were willing to see that if they were in sales, they knew they drove marketing crazy and wanted to find out why. They knew that if they were in supply chain, they drove R&D crazy and they wanted to find out why. They didn’t just intensify the rivalries. They actually built bridges and created community across unlikely boundaries because they understood that that’s where real value gets created.

The third was decision-making choice. So, the most influential people are not afraid of hard choices. Too many people get into influential positions where they want to please everybody. They say ‘yes’ too often. They make promises they can’t keep. And they dilute the focus of the organization because they commit to way too many things and, in so doing, they institutionalize mediocrity, because everybody is trying to do everything and then, therefore, nothing well.

So these people could say no. They knew that that influence and leadership mean disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. That it’s okay to say ‘no’ for the greater good. And that the greatest gift you can give those you’re trying to influence is focus and a narrowed set of priorities.

And the last one, not surprisingly, was connection, was the relationship they have with people. What was interesting about this group, from an influence point of view, is that they didn’t prioritize their stakeholders, bosses, peers, or direct reports according to what they needed or what they could get from them. They prioritized their relationships according to what they could most contribute. They focused more on the people whose agendas they could drive, on whose development they could advance, on whose success they could contribute to more so than the people they needed to contribute to theirs.

You’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them in organizations. These are the people everybody wants to be around, the bosses everybody wants to work for, they’re the ones who are just nice, good-hearted people. They’re smart. You know that if you’re in their presence you’re going to feel good, you’re going to learn, you’re going to be committed, you’re going to feel safe to be yourself. And they’re the ones that are the most influential.

So context, breadth, choice, connection. Four not easy things but the key thing is, to your listeners, Andrea, is the time to start learning these is yesterday. If you wait until your first significantly influential role to start learning them, that’s probably not going to go too well.

But you can start learning these right at college. You can find seams and boundaries to cross. You can be contextually curious. You can start figuring out what is your decision-making apparatus and how do you prioritize and how do you narrow and say no and find the courage to make hard choices. And you can start finding ways to help other people be successful. So the sooner you start putting those muscles, the more likely it is you will be influential.

Andrea: That’s so good. These are great. OK, you also have done research recently on honesty. How does that connect with this? Why did you make that choice to study honesty?

Ron Carucci: After our 10-year study, the database grew. So at 15 years, we now have 3300 interviews in the database. In those first four patterns we isolated, we were looking for what shapes individual behavior. But I wanted to know what it was that could create systemic performance position.

We didn’t go looking for… we decided, since we’re using some pretty sophisticated Artificial Intelligence, we’ve got IBM Watson in there, which is an amazing technology, we thought, “Let’s let it tell us.” It reads the data, Andrea, we’re talking creepy-well, like it’s creepy what this stuff can read. So we thought, “Well, let’s see what it will tell us about the system of organization.”

It turns out it came back and it was able to predict four – there may have been more but we cut it off at four – conditions in which people will lie, but they line up very closely with the pattern. This was not intentional. This was just serendipity. But they line up with those four patterns of influence.

The first one was strategic clarity. So if your organization lacks that, meaning you have a mission, vision, and value, you have identity statements that don’t match your behavior in the eyes of your customers or your employees, or if I go around the organization and I say, “Hey, what’s your strategy,” and I get 20 different answers, or people’s own sense of purpose is not locatable in your purpose, so there’s a disconnect there, if that strategic clarity is missing, you are three times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

The second one was accountability systems. The way contribution is measured, not compensated but measured, is seen as unfair. In other words, people think that there’s a bias. They think they’re not really truly being heard or seen. They don’t think they’re getting fair feedback. If your accountability systems are seen as unfair, you are four times more likely to have people lie and withhold the truth.

The third was governance. If your decision-making processes of the way resources are allocated is not transparent, it’s opaque, it seems capricious. In other words, there’s no form for the truth to be told and it has to go underground. You are three-and-a-half times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

And lastly, if you have unresolved conflict, if you have cross-border rivalry, if you have conflicts at the seams between departments that remain unresolved, in other words, if you fragmented the truth and now we have dueling truths, you’re six times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

Andrea: Wow!

Ron Carucci: And it’s cumulative, so for the cash, the cruise and the car, if you have all four of those conditions, congratulations, you’re 16 times more likely to find yourself on the headline of a newspaper and a story you’d never wanted to be in. So I was sort of sitting around playing with these content and I put them side by side and I realized, oh, my gosh, if you’re a contextual leader, you could bring strategic clarity. If you have breadth, you can bridge the seams. If you’re a good choice maker, if you can narrow priorities, you can contribute to great governance. And if you build great connections, you can hold people accountable in an honest way.

So the four influence patterns can have a direct implication on creating a more honest organization, not just a more influential one.

Andrea: That’s just incredibly powerful. So how do companies utilize or how can they utilize this research that you’ve done in these connections and these insights that you have you’ve made?

Ron Carucci: Well, the first thing is to be honest.

Andrea: Right.

Ron Carucci: Everybody wants… 5,000 people did not wake up at Wells Fargo one morning and say, “Hey, here’s an idea.” You know, 90 R&D engineers didn’t get up one morning in Germany and say, “I know how to beat out that electric car market. Let’s sell more diesel cars.” These are things that happen over time, right? The fungus in that ethical Petri dish grew over time.

So be honest that the origins of these problems are much, much sooner than you think they are. By the time you were starting to hear noise or symptoms are starting to appear or scandals are emerging, you are years past the origins of those stories.

So diagnose. What do we say about cancer? Early prevention, early cure, right? Get your annual MRI done. Have your organization looked at not just for ethical things but just for its wholeness. We’re not just talking about integrity as a matter of truth telling, but integrity as a matter of consistency, congruence. You are being who you say you are. You are deciding on things according to a strategy you commit to. You are teaching leaders to con to talk about contributions in a fair way.

This is all organizational health issues that will… if you’re wondering why half of your employee population is disengaged or your employee engagement scores are what they are, or you’re having talent defections by your most talented people, this is not random. It’s not because it’s a good employer marker, right? People really do quit bosses, not companies.

So, for goodness sake, don’t ignore the signs that there are some even minor cracks in the foundation of your organization. Go dig deep. Get an MRI to understand where might we be at risk, where might we be susceptible to problems down the road that we might not want to be part of, and do and address it head on.

Andrea: Now, with this one, with this being honest part, this is kind of hard because prevention is much more difficult or it’s much more difficult to convince people to actually do. What kind of organizations tend to actually be honest in the first place? Which ones are choosing to not ignore the signs and things like that?

Ron Carucci: I’m studying one company right now in Phoenix, Arizona. They’re called Nextiva and I’m studying them. I just wrote a piece in Forbes about them and I think I’m going to study them for a book I’m writing on this. The hard answer is the ones that build them from the ground up that way, right?

Now, I don’t want to have to say that either. It’s like saying you have to be good at all four of these things. I don’t want to have to say, “Well, if you’re now 40 years old, you’re too far gone.” I do think if a leadership is committed to wanting a healthy, whole, vibrant organization, you can. And, you know, people can come back from Stage VI cancer, right? You just have to go and do the work. You have to care enough to want to go there.

If your complacency, if your success, if your financial success is tied too much to the status quo, if you’re too fearful of making change or too fearful of looking in a mirror of what it might tell you, it’s like the person who doesn’t go to the dentist. It’s like, “Well, I don’t want to go now.” So suddenly it’s eight years later and their teeth are falling out. Denial is a very powerful force.

I think the organizations that are, it’s hard to say it, Andrea, but the ones who are in pain, the ones who skin their knees, who get some early warning signs that things aren’t going well. Pain is a marvelous source of commitment. As the old adage goes, the sight of the gallows focuses the mind. But it would sure be great not to have to wait until you’re in pain before going. You get an annual physical for a reason.

So, I don’t know why leaders wouldn’t want to be honest in the employee engagement survey. Would you not want to have some ongoing set of metrics that tell you is my organization and those leading it healthy, and doing it in a way that is consistent with who we say we are?

The thing I always tell my leaders is, “Would you tell your mother? If the next morning, would you make a decision that you would be proud to tell your mom and that you wouldn’t mind having it on the cover of the New York Times?” If you can tell me ‘yes’ to both those things, you’re good. But if you would not be proud to tell your mom or you would not want it on the cover of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, there’s a reason that you should have paused.

Andrea: Yes, absolutely. That’s really interesting. And definitely with the pain, it’s the same way with individual people. People don’t want to change until they are kind of shaken. It takes a lot for people to change individually too.

Ron Carucci: And most of us are all _____ until our doctors say, “two of the four are occluded,” we don’t think about our cardiac health. I was walking around with a really strong pain in my calf all fall long and I was afraid it was a blood clot because I had blood clot pain in… DVTs, deep vein thrombosis in my family. I went and had an ultrasound on Christmas Eve. I was so panicked. It wasn’t that at all. That’s OK. It’s muscle strain. So I continued to play tennis. I continued to play. I wrapped it. I didn’t really ice it much, but I kept it wrapped.

Until one day on a tennis court, early January, big popping noise, and I’m down on the ground writhing in pain because I slipped muscle. Why? Because I thought, “Oh, it’ll be fine.” I checked and it wasn’t a blood clot. Well, when the lady came back into the ER and said, “Not a blood clot,” and handed me a whole bunch of information on muscle strains, what caused me to not go, “Oh, I guess this really is a problem.” I decided it wasn’t the problem I was most fearful of, so it wasn’t a problem.

Andrea: Right. Yes. It’s not the one that we’re looking for.

Ron Carucci: Right. And then I paid a price for this. Then I was off the tennis court for two-and-half months, where it could have been probably three weeks had I just taken care of the problem when I really first dealt with that, which was like October.

So you’re right, as human beings we’re comfort-seeking, stability-seeking machines. We want stability. We are homeostatic-seeking machines. And we all say we’re all for change but what I really am is all for you changing, especially if you change so I don’t have to.

Andrea: Totally. OK, so be honest. That’s the first one. What’s the second one?

Ron Carucci: So get data, do diagnosis that tells you where you’re vulnerable, where you susceptible, or where you have a disease growing and then act upon it. And don’t look for quick fixes. Don’t run everybody through an integrity workshop for half a day on a video. Don’t do a campaign. Don’t go put up posters that say, “Hey, if you see something, say something,” and think that the “nudges” are going to change behavior.

Don’t do team building. If you’ve got a lot of cross-border conflict, don’t bring everybody together to do trust falls.

The origins of these problems are systemic and you have to put in systemic solutions. If people in sales or marketing aren’t getting along, don’t just bring them together for a workshop on collaboration. Look at the incentives and what their metrics are. Look at governance to see where decision making is happening. Look at how the resources are allocated to see do they understand the value of your brand that both of them hold? Is sales being incented to sell things and make promises that marketing can’t keep? So, look at the systemic things that may be causing the conflict. It’s not just always interpersonal

Andrea: Totally.

Ron Carucci: The interpersonal things you’re seeing are probably more symptoms than they are roots.

Andrea: That’s great. So, either two then? Is that what you’re basically…

Ron Carucci: I think the last thing I would say is install a mechanism that continually gives you ongoing feedback. Just like a diabetic puts a meter in his or her arm to constantly be monitoring blood glucose, find ways that you have regular access to the health of your organization and the vibrancy you want it to have and be fine tuning all the time so you don’t get to the place where you would ditch.

Andrea: So how do you, how does your company actually help other companies to do this?

Ron Carucci: We have a really forensic way of doing a deep MRI. When we go in and we want to get a look under the hood, we do a very, very comprehensive diagnostic look. We extract data from people’s minds and hearts and the archives of your database, unlike what most people can’t do, and when we bring together an entire story that’s comprehensive.

And we put back in the room every single voice that you send onto the room. So we force leaders to listen to… by reading hundreds of pages of comments and data that we code in very sophisticated coding technology so you don’t know who said it but you know what was said.

So you hear everything we heard, you see everything we see, and then we make you spend time in a room for day or two. You have to make sense of that story. We’re not going to come and tell you as consultants, “Here’s the answer.” We’re going to say, “OK, here are the questions you obviously have been avoiding. Now, you as the leadership would have to look each other in the eye, look in the mirror at that hundred pages of story and we’re going to work until you have conclusions, until you have a plan you feel good about.

And at that point then I’ll tell you what I think. I’ll tell you my point of view as an outsider comparing you to the other hundreds of companies I’ve worked with. There might be a 15 percent gap that I may have to sharpen the contrast on but, for the most part, we’ll be aligned. The difference is you’re going to own it because it’s your story.

So the next chapter of that story is yours to write, not mine. So I think then we’ve got a very different psychological process that I’ve now forced you and your team to look at in the mirror, look at a story, say hard things to each other and now take ownership of a story in ways that you can circumvent.

And the minute that consultants come in with the answers, they went in and now it’s analyze and recommend, then I’m going to get up and 20 slides and tell you what you have to go do. There is zero emotional ownership for those answers in the room. I’ve now sidestepped the most important part of creating transformational change, which is embedding into your heart, mind, and soul the need to understand your role in how we got here and how we get to where we’re going to go.

Andrea: I think that’s brilliant. And it has to be very, very effective. Do you have a difficult time getting people… or I suppose if they want to work with you, that’s just the way it is, right?

Ron Carucci: Well, yeah. On occasion, we’ll get a leader who will say something like, “Oh, you don’t need to do any diagnostics. I can tell you what’s wrong.” To which we typically say, “Uh-huh. If you could have done that you wouldn’t have had to call.” So obviously we already know what you’re thinking the problem is as either, at best, partially right or completely wrong.

And I think if you have a severe pain in your chest and you walked into a cardiologist and you pointed to it saying, “There’s this really sharp pain right here.” And your cardiologist quickly said, “Oh, upper-left quadrant ventricle needs a stent. Let’s go put one in.” Would you just walk into the OR with them and let them put you under and cut you open? Would you not want to say, “Uh, don’t you want to look first?”

Why, for goodness sake, would you do that with your organization if you wouldn’t do it with your own body? Why would you just go cutting up your organization? And we do it all the time, just we snip orchards and rearrange deckchairs. We slap on new processes. We overlaid new training and skills. And we just pile up, we pile on new governance with new task forces and new committees and whatever. It’s like bad wallpaper in a house. You walk into a house and there’s like nine layers of wallpaper smacked on top of each other, and they’re all peeling off and it won’t take another one.

Why would you do that to your organization if you wouldn’t do it to your body?

Andrea: I love that. That’s a great analogy. So, is there something that… just off the record here real quick, I have on here that it looks like you have something to offer people, your website and then transformation. Do you want to tell people about it?

Ron Carucci: Yeah. By all means, come stay in touch. We can be found at Navalent.com. We’ve got a free ebook called Leading Transformation. If you want to know more about our playbook and how we do this, come to navalent.com/transformation and download our free ebook on all the ways we think about change and transformational work.

We’ve got some phenomenal videos. We’ve got great whitepapers. We have a quarterly magazine called the Navalent Quarterly. You can subscribe for free. We’ve got lots of rich content. If all this is of interest to you, come hang out with us. You can all also find me on Twitter @RonCarucci and you can find me on LinkedIn as well, so love to keep chatting.

Andrea: Great! Thank you so much for being with us here today at the Voice of Influence. We’re really honored to have you and inspired. There’s so much here to dive into and for people to really chew on and think about and really act on. Thank you so much for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners,

Ron Carucci: Andrea, the pleasure was mine. Thanks so much for having me.

Posted on Monday, July 22, 2019

Reframe Your Company’s Future with Aviv Shahar

Episode 99

Aviv Shahar enables Fortune 500 companies to create purpose-inspired visions that bring out the best in their people and catalyze growth. As the President of Aviv Consulting and the author of Create New Futures, Aviv guides executive teams at companies around the world to dramatically accelerate the achievement of their business results. In this episode, Aviv discusses what it means to create a new future as leaders of teams and in our personal lives, how “collective stupidity” inspired Aviv’s work, the importance of creating a learning culture, why it’s difficult for leaders to listen to others and even themselves, the two layers of having an authentic voice, the four quadrants of conflict, how he helps his clients improve their introspection skills, the five levels of integrity, and so much more!Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Aviv Shahar Voice of Influence Andrea Joy Wenburg

Posted on Monday, July 15, 2019

Navigating the Digital Transformation in Sales with Rick McCutcheon

Episode 98

For the past twenty years, Rick McCutcheon has helped hundreds of business-to-business businesses improve their sales results. He is the creator of the Full Contact Selling System that allows sales teams to leverage powerful business development strategies through best practice use of technology. Rick has been awarded the prestigious designations of Certified Sales Professional with Distinction and is a five-time recipient of the coveted Microsoft Dynamics MVP award. As a professional speaker and workshop leader, Rick has traveled globally to deliver his practical yet innovative messages on the digital transformation of B2B selling to thousands of business professionals. In this episode, we discuss what exactly Rick does for his clients, how customer service plays a role in the digital transformation of B2B sales, the shocking statistic about how far along in the buying process a business typically is before they reach out to a sales representative, the importance of utilizing LinkedIn as a sales representative, how he helps his clients implement these digital transformations throughout their companies, the future of digital transformation, and more.

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Rick McCutcheon. We were both at a conference recently and I was really impressed with Rick, and I’m really excited to have him here today on the podcast.

So, for the past 20 years, Rick has helped hundreds of B2B businesses improve their sales results. He is the creator of the Full Contact Selling system that allows sales teams to leverage powerful business development strategies through best practice use of technology. He has been awarded the prestigious designations of “Certified Sales Professional with Distinction” and is a 5-time recipient of the coveted Microsoft Dynamics MVP Award.

As a professional speaker and workshop leader, he has traveled globally to deliver his practical yet innovative messages on the Digital Transformation of the B2B selling to thousands of business profile professionals.

Andrea: Alright, Rick, it’s great to have you here on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Rick McCutcheon: Thank you, Andrea. It’s my pleasure.

Andrea: So, tell us a little bit about what you do with Full Contact Selling?

Rick McCutcheon: Yeah. It’s interesting because you know, the name of my company is Full Contact Selling and I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, but my company has sort of moved in some different directions over the years. For most of my career, I’ve been in the CRM business, customer relationship management, which is a software category. And I’ve always sort of focused on the sales force automation component.

So, yes, there is a sales training component to what I do but it’s kind of much, much more. We work with organizations and we talk about this digital transformation of selling. We help them understand how to reorganize their sales teams really to, you know, change their processes because customer’s buying processes changed so drastically in B2B over the last 10 years. So we work on the process with them. We take that process and then we look at the technology.

And I specialize in an area, and this is where my MVP is with Microsoft and there’s Dynamics 365, which was formally called Dynamics CRM. So, I specialize in Dynamic CRM, but I also bring in other components like marketing automation. I do a lot of work around LinkedIn, LinkedIn Sales Navigator now to say, “OK, I’m working in the organization. Here’s how we’re gonna, you know, re engineer their sales process to really fit these new socialize buying models and then what do we do with the technology?”

Now the third piece to this is with the people. So, now I’m dealing with a lot of, you know, sales people that have been around for quite a long time or sometimes we’re dealing sort of a younger millennial sales force. How do we now train them to think differently about sort of selling and social selling and contact management in the use of technology so they understand how important these technologies are to the sales process.

Andrea: I know that you spoke recently at this conference about digital experience and customer experience that sort of thing. How does customer experience relate to and why is it such a big deal now in regards to the digital transformation?

Rick McCutcheon: So, you know, we met a few weeks ago at CRM Evolution 2019 in Washington and there are some different components to that; CRM, customer service, call center. And I was speaking in a couple of those categories and it’s a really interesting question you asked because most companies I worked with didn’t start out to reengineer their sales process. They realize they had to reengineer their sales process because the way the customer wanted to be engaged has changed so drastically.

And I specialize in the B2B world. So most people think, “Well, that really hasn’t changed that much.” But that’s not true because B2C, which is the consumer buying completely changed over the last 20 years. You know, we see Amazon coming and really making other retailers up their game. We’re seeing the same thing in B2B because people now want to deal with their supply chain and their different vendors really digitally. They want their own self-serve portals. They want information when they need it. They want to be notified when their products need service, so customers are demanding more from organizations today.

Andrea: Hmm. What are some of the biggest changes then that have taken place do you think?

Rick McCutcheon: The biggest change is really, there was a study done in 2012; IBM was one of the coauthors of the study. And in 2012, they showed in their study that the average buyer in a B2B business was 57 percent through the buying process before they actually reached out to a vendor. And this was true because they could go on the internet and find out everything they need.

Well, other studies had been done since. But in 2016, I talked to somebody at Microsoft, my main partner and my friend was a marketing director there and she said, “Well, we’re probably closer to 70 percent.” So that was 2016. So, I’m thinking we’re now 2019, we’re midyear at this point, how far along the buying process is the customer before they have to reach out to us? And, really, the answer could be 80 percent or more.

Andrea: Wow! So you’re saying that they’ve already done their own research? They’ve already looked at your website and that sort of thing or what other kinds of things are they doing before they even reach out?

Rick McCutcheon: Well, it really means that you know, something triggers internally in that company saying, you know, “We have to go buy a CRM system.” “What do we know about CRM?” They’ll meet as a group. Talk about, you know, “Well, I’ve used sales force. I’ve used sales logics. I’ve used dynamics CRM in the past.” They’ll have a group conversation and then they’ll send a researcher to the web to find out everything they need to know.

They’ll look at which companies should they deal with. They’ll look at which partners they may deal with that have it implemented. They’ll go into user group communities and talk to people who use the product. They’ll go on sites like G2 Crowd and actually look at verified reviews to see how people like the software.

In fact, at the conference, there was a gentleman there speaking from G2 Crowd, and in his presentation he claimed their study show that up to 45 percent of B2B software buyers are now a 100 percent through the buying process before they actually reach out to a vendor.

Andrea: So they’ve already decided

Rick McCutcheon: They’re way down the road and they’re really looking at now who can add more value to me or help, you know, move me through this journey.

Andrea: Interesting. So what do you think that accompanies to have in place in order to be prepared for that kind of, I guess educated or a client that’s taking that much initiative or potential customer that’s taking that much initiative on the front end?

Rick McCutcheon: We’ve got to reorganize our sales teams for one thing, right? So, you know, I don’t want to say cold calling is dead, but it’s limping along pretty badly these days. It’s very difficult to get through on a cold call. It’s almost like we have to learn to influence the customer, influence the prospect, just like your podcast is named.

So, we have to get out there and get the right content to where they’re going to find it to say, “Hey, there is Rick McCutcheon, Full Contact Selling, maybe he can help me with my CRM.” Then they looked at my profile on LinkedIn and say, “Wow, he looks like the Dynamics CRM guy. So, if we’re going with dynamics, he looks like a choice.” But if they were going with sales force, they wouldn’t pick me, right?

So, if you follow my social media and website, I’ve really focused in on that market I’m going after. So, when they’re out searching, they’re going to find me and I think companies have to figure out how to do that and look at who’s my buyer and what journey do they go on when they buy and actually have the things out there to be able to impact them.

And then from a sales rep perspective, they better be very, very, very good on LinkedIn because they’ve got to look good. They’ve got to look like an expert. They’ve got to look like an authority and they’ve got to look like a trusted advisor in their LinkedIn profile to make sure someone’s going to reach out and accept their invitation to LinkedIn.

Andrea: Yeah. That’s a really interesting point. So do you have any specific suggestions about how somebody should utilize their profile on LinkedIn? You said they should look like this. Do you have any suggestions about how they can look like that?

Rick McCutcheon: Well, I’ll give you an example. I did some work in the mining supply area and was up in Northern Canada doing some sessions with a supply group up there. And one fellow’s profile had no picture, spelling errors on it, you know, no real background on their LinkedIn profile. And another person had, you know, the profile was all done with an open pit mine heavy equipment in the background. All the staff had all the mining gear on in their photographs, all their details were about them working in the mining industry.

So, I went to the one guy who actually hired me and I said, “Look at your profile against that profile.” And he said to me, “We’re a better company than they are.” I said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, here’s the problem. I’m meeting you guys for the first time and the race has started and you’re not even out of the starting gates than this guy who’s a hundred yards ahead of you.” “He looks like a much better supplier than you do, so now you’ve gotta prove to me that you’re better than this person.” And it all started with maybe, you know, $1,500 investment one company made in their corporate LinkedIn profiles versus somebody who showed they don’t care.

Andrea: That’s very interesting and that’s been something that I’ve paid attention to when working with companies too, how do they show up on LinkedIn and do they even show up on LinkedIn. You can tell the people that have spent a little time on it and you know, invest in that side of things and then people who don’t. It’s also hard I think to convince people that that’s important, but what you just said made a lot of sense.

Do you think that most people really are going to LinkedIn to look up? What percentage of people are going to LinkedIn before they make a buying decision? Any idea?

Rick McCutcheon: I don’t know. Depends on who we talk about, right? If we talk about it in the procurement area, they go to social, right? What social they go to depends, right? So if I’m dealing with a self-service company and I’m doing 80 percent of my profile through self-serve, my purchase through self-serve, I may never get to LinkedIn. I may look at the web, I may look at, you know, Facebook, who knows where I’m going to Pinterest, who knows where I’m going to be pulled into this company.

But as soon as I’m a sales rep and I expose myself and I reach out to you, Andrea and say, “Hey Andrea, I’m Rick McCutcheon from Full Contact Selling, I need to talk to you about your CRM system.” Then bang, they’re coming back to my LinkedIn profile to see if number one, is this a real person or some kind of AI robot reaching out? Or is this spam or do I know this person, or how am I connected to this person?

So, I say, the vast majority of people are going into LinkedIn, but you know, you hit a note there that I find humorous. Like if I go into a company and they don’t believe this is happening, I show them some studies from Google, some studies from IBM. And you know what, if they still don’t think it’s happening, let them hold onto their ideas and let them just drift off into retirement because they’re going to get there very quickly because this B2B process from the buyers’ perspective is changing very, very quickly. And if they can accept that then I can only bring the evidence to them. If they don’t accept the evidence, I just move on.

Andrea: Ok, so you mentioned Sales Navigator. What maybe one or two tips do you have for people in utilizing Sales Navigator to reach out to businesses?

Rick McCutcheon: Your ability to target, right? I do work for some incubators. One fellow built a system for tinnitus, for treatment and it was a hearing system and it was tested at the University of Buffalo. So, we said, “OK, who do we need to go to out there to test it with their patients?” So, we went to audiologist who graduated from the University of Buffalo where the study was done on this device.

And we targeted like 3000 people who fit that category and we found them in minutes in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. In the good old world of selling, there’s no way I could have found them at all and this was instantaneous. So, if I’m a sales rep or any kind of, you know, company business development and I have to target a specific kind of person, the only way I’m going to find them is LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Andrea: OK, so let’s talk about Microsoft 365 or whenever you’re implementing something like this with a company. I’m assuming that they already know that they want to use a system like this or do you help them figure out what system they should be using or do they already know when they come to you?

Rick McCutcheon: By the time they come to me, they typically know they’re using Dynamics 365. And you know that goes back to my LinkedIn profile. My LinkedIn profile has me as Dynamics 365 guy, right? So if they’re looking at salesforce.com or a NetSuite or another product, when they get to my profile, I’m not the person they’re going to touch and reach out to. I’ve done that on purpose.

Andrea: It filters people.

Rick McCutcheon: Yeah, because people because I want the right people reaching out to me.

Andrea: Sure.

Rick McCutcheon: So, if I was in a situation where some dealers are more of a competitive market, I may end up in that deal early on. But the type of work I’m doing, which is the fine tuning of the product, you know, usually comes after the implementation.

Andrea: What is it? Do you mind just sharing a little bit about the product itself?

Rick McCutcheon: CRM or my product?

Andrea: Yours.

Rick McCutcheon: Well, it’s a methodology, right? So, I’ll start out going through an interview process with the company, understanding what they do, and 99 percent of the time I’m working with senior sales team or senior marketing team. You know, what they do, who’s their target market, how do they service, did they sell direct, or did they sell through a channel? Do they sell through some kind of online direct model to figure out what they’re selling, how they’re selling, look at their process today of what they do, how they manage their accounts.

And over the years, I’ve accumulated hundreds of models that I have in these flow charts. So I go out and say, “OK, here’s the five models we need that fit this company.” We come back, we customize those models for that company and then we come out with a sort of a punch list of, you know, what do we have to do to the CRM system to be able to implement this process. What do we have to do a lot of times for marketing automation and LinkedIn, so what are the things we need to do to make this process flow and then I help them with that project plan.

Andrea: Do you ever find that the people that maybe are on the frontlines that aren’t necessarily working with you directly that they have a hard time implementing the changes that they have been asked to implement when it comes to this new technology that they’re using or these changes that they’ve been made?

Rick McCutcheon: More so in the past. We’re getting so that pretty much everybody who’s still working today is very fairly computer literate. I was doing this back in the 90s. So, back in the 90s, we were working with sales teams with, you know, some completely non-computer users. But you know, pretty much if you’re still in the workforce today, you’re using computers.

You know, getting people to share their information and change their process is probably more of a challenge. And we’re moving away from an independent maverick type sales model where, you know, “Here’s a sales rep and I own my customer.” We’re moving into more of a team selling model where, you know, it’s the marketing of the content, customer service, you know, maybe field service and the sales team really manage that customer together.

Andrea: Yeah. So, when they are doing that or when they’re trying to move toward that, I guess I’m wondering if you ever have any tips for how to help people to understand why it’s so important and why they should do it.

Rick McCutcheon: I’ve got a whole program on user adoption. So yeah, I teach a workshop on it. So you know, the whole user adoption thing is you got to tell them why. You know, figure out why they need to do and get them understand that it’s to their benefit to accumulate this data and to understand their data. You’ve got to get management to manage from the data.

So, you know, if I’m asking my people to use CRM, but I don’t use it myself then there’s a big gap there as well as do I manage from the reports and the dashboards within CRM. So that’s really important giving them as much training and coaching as they need.

You know, the biggest failures I’ve ever seen is when IT department goes and customizes the software and hands it out to the reps and say, “Here’s your software, go use it.” So, we typically put a six-week user adoption program together that includes training coaches, videos, and you know, one-on-one follow-up and this is what I strongly suggest to companies.

Andrea: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Rick McCutcheon: Yes for sure.

Andrea: Yeah. I think that that’s one of the things that can really hold people up and hold the process up when you’re trying to implement something new. I love that you have a whole program that kind of helps them to implement immediately over the course of that six weeks. That’s great!

Rick McCutcheon: I have a good question for you.

Andrea: Yeah, sure.

Rick McCutcheon: Ask me where all this is going in the future.

Andrea: I was just thinking something like that. Yes, I’m totally going to ask that.

Rick McCutcheon: Okay.

Andrea: So where is this digital transformation going in the future? Where are we headed?

Rick McCutcheon: Well, you know, it gets really interesting we start talking about this topic because you know, are we going to be able to operate without sales teams out there? And I don’t believe so. I think, there’s going to be a blending of technology, blending of people’s skills and understanding that conversation and helping people to decide, you know, which solution is better for them.

So, I think, you know, sales professionals are still absolutely needed out in the world even though some techies really kind of are trying to get us to believe it’s all about click, try, and buy, right? We’re finding, it’s really all about more about that relationship, more about trust you’re building with the customer. And I think LinkedIn proves that.

Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion, I think it was about three years ago now. And, you know, that’s really a social platform where we can connect with other people and communicate with other people and when we need to talk to other people. So, I think there’s proof there that, you know, relationships are still wanted in needed in our culture. So, it’s going to really remain as part of that process.

Andrea: Yes.

Rick McCutcheon: And not give your customers the platform they need and the ability to self-serve when they want; they’re going to go find other suppliers.

Andrea: You know, it kind of makes me think of the old small town kind of selling, you know, and the idea of the people really want to do business with people they know and trust. They still do, even if it’s online.

I look at my dad and he does sales in a small town and those relationships and building into the community and doing things for the community and being out there and having conversations in the community, all of that is now just as relevant. It seems like it’s moved online for the most part, besides the opportunities that people have to connect at conferences and things like that, I suppose.

Rick McCutcheon: And you know what your dad sells in a small town and I’m sure he has a great little business there too, but you know, the world’s a global place. It’s amazing how LinkedIn has allowed us to connect to who we need to connect to no matter where they’re located.

Andrea: Yeah. That’s really cool. Well, Rick, tell us how can listeners get in touch with you or where should they follow you on LinkedIn, obviously. We should be following you on LinkedIn.

Rick McCutcheon:Absolutely. If you go on LinkedIn, you look for Rick McCutcheon, there’s a guy who’ a massive body builder and then there’s the CRM sales process guy. And some people get confused at times, but you’ll see that I’m the sales process CRM fellow. So connect to me and I do lots of webinars, seminars, and events. And hopefully, I can help your audience sort of better understand this world of digital sales transformation.

Andrea: Great! Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with this here at the Voice of Influence podcast.

Rick McCutcheon: Oh, thank you. It’s been my pleasure, Andrea!

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