Dynamic Stability: 10 Ways To Put Your Customer First

It’s no secret that organizations today face unprecedented challenges and leaders, including marketing executives, are under pressure to deliver growth and think beyond the confines of their particular function. Jay Weiser from the Weiser Strategy Group, whose career in business strategy consulting has led him to work with top leaders across multiple industries, has seen businesses succeed and fail in their effort to keep pace. “With near-constant change and disruption, leaders and their organizations must recognize that stability is a relic of the past and what differentiated in the past isn’t adequate for the future,” he said. Here are ten concepts to help you think about cross-functional alignment and delivering an exceptional customer experience in your business:

1. Stability is dead. In a business landscape now characterized by constant change, companies and leaders who “wait for the dust to settle” will be left in that same dust by competitors. "Understanding context is key to change,” Weiser said. “Industries are being disrupted. Customers are now better informed than company salespeople. Competitors are more aggressive."

2. The future belongs to the nimble. “Companies who are prepared, ready, and able to act have a significant advantage over those who are not,” he noted. “They can bounce back from disruptions faster and pounce on opportunities quicker. Conversely, those who are not, often do not bounce back and miss opportunities.”

3. Dynamic stability is the key. Weiser calls “dynamic stability” the key to the future. “Flying a helicopter is a great example of dynamic stability,” he proposed. “Helicopter pilots maintain constant awareness of changes in the environment and actively and frequently adjust the controls to hover or fly to where they want.” Leaders and their organizations need the same capabilities to guide and manage their companies. “There is no other way to fly a helicopter successfully and the same goes for leading and managing a business into the future.”

4. Customer-centricity is now table stakes. "Even before it became trendy to talk about customer experience or customer engagement, many successful companies were already putting those concepts into practice,” observed Weiser. “While it used to be a differentiating choice, now it is a necessary requirement." Customers in the past put up with a lot of cost, inconvenience, and opacity in their buying choices. “Now, power has shifted to the customer,” he continued. “They know more and have more choices. Now it’s imperative that companies quickly resolve these business issues or face, possibly irreversible, consequences to their businesses. “

5. Your metrics might be holding you back. “A new CEO at a well-known national grocery chain recognized that the chain was not consistently delivering on their long-held and core brand promise of superior customer service,” Weiser recalled. “He quickly realized that one of their main metrics of success, items per labor-hour (a productivity/efficiency measure) disincentivized management from encouraging customer-centric behaviors and investing in customer service like training. De-emphasizing this metric and raising the importance of key customer service metrics helped them pull ahead of competition and achieve better than peer financial results.” It’s time to review how you are measuring your success and ensure that it aligns with the things upon which your customer is measuring your performance.

6. Tomorrow’s customer might not have a voice in your decision making processes today. “Organizations need to see and consider the need to change earlier, even if it puts some of their present business at risk,” he proposed. “One company I worked with had built a very successful company based on their website.” Salespeople and some leaders were asking for a mobile solution saying that is what customers will want. Management response was that current customers were using and valuing the desktop solution. “Our desktop solution is what makes the company money,” they said. “We don’t know how to do it on a mobile device.” In reality, the customer of the future might not have a seat at the table yet, but should and if they did they certainly don’t care much about how you make money today.

7. Talk is cheap. Alignment is hard. "Being aligned for or talking about customer-centricity is not enough,” Weiser claimed. “Functions like Marketing, Sales, IT, Finance, and HR need to collaborate and act in an integrated manner to successfully to improve customer experience, increase customer engagement, and drive growth and employee engagement and experience.” To be successful, strategy execution must be a team sport.

8. Functional excellence is the ball-hogging of business. Weiser recounted that recently too long a CMO at an executive team strategic planning session said his departmental goal is to “build a world-class marketing organization, recognized by the industry.” The CEO pounded the table and said in colorful language that he didn't care about building a world-class department or being recognized by the industry, but rather he wanted to know how the CMO and the marketing department was going to help him grow their business. This is true of any function. Prioritizing functional excellence can undermine overall customer centricity.

9. C-level leadership needs to coach a new game. "Watching cross-functional leadership mature is like watching children learning to play soccer,” he offered. “At first, they just are amazed at how far the ball goes when kicked. Then they start playing in parallel they all chase the ball.” Which in itself is an early form of alignment. “Then there is some role differentiation and ultimately the most successful teams are the ones that will play as a team, passing the ball and actively assisting each other.” This is accomplished because players learn not only how to play, but more importantly how and why to play together and to keep score. “Not by the number of points they score individually or minutes of playing time, but by how the team performs overall," he concluded.

10. Change has a cost, but it might be less than you think. "When considering whether to change, organizations need to ask themselves and seriously consider the risk and cost of doing nothing,” Weiser reminded. “Leaders most often over-estimate the cost or risk involved in changing and under-estimate or do not account for the impact of not changing." Whether the change is an adaptation of success metrics, a delegation of decision making, or a strategic pivot, consider the cost of grasping to the illusion of stability.

Achieving dynamic stability provides a chance for your organization to satisfy the customers of today and tomorrow and become the positive disruptor of the customer experience in your industry.

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This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Listening At Scale: 4 Ways To Build Customer-Centricity

Chief Marketing Officer Denise Karkos joined what is now TD Ameritrade in 2006 and has seen a lot of changes in her tenure there. The bank is a fixture in the world of investing, with over 360 branches and numerous recognitions over its 40-year history. In 2016, it bought Scottrade, “which doubled the size of our sales force and blended two cultures,” Karkos explained. This created new opportunities and challenges for aligning sales and marketing and refining her own leadership in the process.

Starting with Employee Engagement

Since the acquisition, she has "been working to create the best playbooks knowing that in some cases Scottrade had more experience, branches, and tenure to apply,” Karkos offered. “We want to make the combination the best it can be.” This required a large emphasis on listening and communication to ensure the right practices endure and that everyone is aware of the new direction.

“Never underestimate the importance of internal communications,” Karkos advised. “We have 11,000 associates. It can be overwhelming, but is very important to make sure that they all know the strategy and what we are trying to do.” This applies to what happens in the branches with product offerings for local clients, and in the larger marketplace as she builds the brand.

“One of the things that has been important is for us to preview commercials with our associates, to celebrate successes, and even sharing our digital campaigns,” she continued. “I like to share our world with our internal audiences. The advertising is fun, so we invite associates to the set of our commercials and even invite them to be in the spots.” This has led to business-impacting innovation.

“We were working on a commercial for our customers and decided to do some testing with our front-line employees,” she said. “I flew out to our call center and listened to phone calls and we did focus groups with associates.” They watched the rough-cut ad and a dialogue emerged. “One associate said that when he talks to traders the conversations are like therapy sessions. The investor is nervous.” They want to make the right choice and there are a lot of things to consider, which are often outside the domain or professional experience of the client. “They want to know if their decisions are sound,” she recalled. The associate "went on to say that his approach is to invite the client with an invitation: ‘Buddy, let’s talk it out.’” Light bulbs went off around the room and that line made it into the revised ad. “It was important to use the voice of actual conversations. Taking the time to listen to the words customers use," she offered. "In a world when people are uneasy and there is distrust, straight talk goes a long way,” Karkos concluded.

Listening Deeply to Customers

“We do a ton of qualitative and quantitative research to gain insights from consumers,” Karkos explained. “One of the themes that came up time and time again is that the old-school notion of ‘leaving a legacy’ is a superficial insight. It’s more about the emotional insight underneath that. It is about providing safety and security for their family. They want their kids to be okay.” Digging deeper into this theme created a new opportunity to connect with customers on an emotional level.

“We ran a spot around Father’s Day last year where we wrote new lyrics for the Harry Chapin classic ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ to reflect contemporary fatherhood,” Karkos said. “It was a tear-jerker. We previewed the commercial at a sales meeting to 300 of our retail associates and when I looked over the crowd and saw a bunch of tears.” They knew they had something of impact. “Our associates were sending it to their customers knowing that it would appreciate it and be touched by it as well,” Karkos added. Just the kind of viral behavior you want in an advertising campaign.

Over the subsequent months, we started getting stories back from the field. Memories of their own fathers. Stories about their sons. We received videos that they had shot themselves. It prompted a different conversation. With our associates and with their customers.”

“I am held accountable to revenue and profitability and although that ad campaign wasn’t our most profitable investment, I would do it again because of the impact it had internally.” The ad went on to be recognized as a 2017 Clio Music Shortlisted entry for use of music in a short form film.

Aligning Across Functions

“In order to make our customers successful, we need to make our associates successful,” Karkos continued. To understand "a day in their life” and let that influence investment, policies, and processes.

“Right now, it is cumbersome for them to know what ads and offers are in the market.” Due to the expansion of the business and legacy technologies, associates had to reference multiple systems. “We are in the process of developing and rolling out a customer relationship management system that allows a single sign-on and a complete look at the customer journey. This should be a game changer and make their job easier.” It is important to look at the marketing (and sales) technology stack holistically to see the impact on processes across the organization. “You want to innovate with clients,” Karkos added, “but you can’t put the burden on the back of salespeople. We measure share of wallet, but there are steps in the process before share of wallet that need visibility.”

And alignment doesn’t stop there. “We not only have to align with sales as there are other parts of the organization with whom we need to partner. For instance, finance,” Karkos offered.

“Our industry has a necessary evil called ‘offers.’ These are the promotions you see that offer free trades or cash incentives for opening up accounts,” she explained. “We market into a competitive space and we have to be responsive to what is being seen in the market. We have a budget for promotions and in highly-contested markets would often find ourselves out of budget and at a disadvantage.” This was unacceptable in the growth ambitions of the group.

Karkos was able to work with the finance team to “revisit the treatment of these offers to allow us more flexibility. This is the kind of alignment you only get when you are focused on the same growth and profitability goals.”

Demonstrating Leadership

Although Karkos has been in the CMO role for five years, she has reported to the CEO for less than two. This reporting structure and expanded scope have changed the role. “This position in the organization has caused me to focus not just on the ROI of the marketing mix and emerging trends in the industry, but also to drive for better investment decision making overall,” she observed. “Sometimes that means investments in marketing when we are confident that would lead to growth. Other times it is investments in sales or technology with analogous metrics.”

Advocating beyond functional boundaries for the good of the business is an important shift in the maturation of marketing leaders. “There is growth we can get in the industry and we need to make smart investments,” Karkos explains. “I have learned to step back and think more strategically about how I show up in those conversations. Not just representing marketing, but representing the business overall.”

This article was originally published on Forbes.

Jennifer to Contribute to Forbes

Starting this month, I will begin contributing for Forbes.com writing about customer-centric marketing and the alignment of sales and marketing. My work for the CMO Network will highlight who does it best and what we can learn from their success.

You will be able to access all my articles and follow my work here.

I am very excited about writing for Forbes.com, as this topic has the potential to impact so many businesses and their customers. We've all seen it done well and done poorly and had it impact our experience as a consumer or business customer.

Knowing that every company and organization has room to improve, I will be focusing on success stories from across a wide variety of industries, organization types, and business models. I want to use this column to amplify best practices that have helped build brand, serve customers, and facilitated growth.   

Even before my first article is published, I have already had the privilege of interviewing top researchers in the field, as well as practitioners in marketing, sales, and general management leadership roles.  I am anxious to share what I am learning along the way.  Follow my articles, like, comment, and share which will help direct me to how I can help you become better at your craft.

I am also mindful and grateful of my friends, colleagues, and mentors, and now my editors, who have so generously helped me make this platform possible. Special thanks to Moira Vetter with ModoModo, Dan Bruton, Susan Clark, and Kami Toufar especially in their encouragement along the way. 

As leaders and customer advocates, we have an opportunity and responsibility to continue to  learn from the best and develop ourselves and our teams to better serve our customers. I sincerely hope that my articles help and inspire you in this worthy mission.

P.S.  If you know of companies or organizations who align internally and focus on customers particularly well, I welcome your recommendations and introductions. They can connect with me on my blog, Twitter or LinkedIn. As this is a side endeavor for me, and there is much ground to cover, I ask in advance for your patience with me as I follow up on these recommendations. 

Who is Your Boss? The Answer Might Surprise You

This seems like a simple question. One that would be easy to answer. But for those of us in a customer-facing and customer-impacting role or with big ambitions for our career, it is the kind of multiple choice question that leads to new insights and creates different day-to-day priorities and strategies. 

WHO Do You Work for?

Option 1: You work for your employer. This is the most obvious one. You are employed by an organization from which you receive a paycheck. You have a boss (or several). Your boss might have a boss. Your goals are aligned to the financial or strategic goals of the business and the goals of those bosses. And your primary job is to advocate for the company with customers to create enterprise value for the investors of your company and the leadership who is advocating their interest. With this mindset, the importance of “managing up” is clear. Internal relationship building and being visible in the organization is critical. Whether your manager is collaborative, a micro-manager, or empowering, this view dominates the work landscape.

Option 2: You work for your customers. For marketing professionals and other customer-facing roles, this can be a very useful perspective for day-to-day prioritization. Customers ultimately pay the bills and drive growth and profit in the company. Often customer advocacy and resulting business results can lead to personal rewards. If your goals are aligned to the business goals of your customer, this can lead to great partnership and can optimize long-term customer value. Customer experience and customer service are paramount and are driving enterprise value (not the other way around). With this mindset, the importance of customer relationship building is clear. You need to spend time with your boss, after all.  And your primary job is to advocate or the customer within the company.

Option 3: You work for yourself. Perhaps you are self-employed, consult, or rocking the gig economy, but even if you are not, it is helpful to consider this perspective. Even if you are an employee, you own your own career. You own your own development. And for most of us, we own how we apply our time and energy to the various problems and opportunities we face daily. Ultimately, you choose to join companies, which customers or markets you focus on, and how you pursue your personal passions over time. And with this approach, your primary job is to advocate for yourself with customers and the company, to align their goals with the work you want to pursue. In my experience, this perspective comes to the forefront in times of transition or discontent, but otherwise is under-prioritized. 

As you consider your answer, know that it truly is a multiple choice question. Your answer will likely be a mix of all three and will vary over time as needs and priorities changes. 

In any case, I highly recommend you spending time, being mentored by, and really understanding the needs of all three of your bosses - your employer, your customers, and yourself – to ensure that you are performing up to your fullest potential.   We often don’t listen to ourselves or give ourselves the same compassionate and honest advice we would give to colleagues or our employees, even though we could benefit from the self-reflection. And most of us don’t ask or receive advice frequently enough from our employers or our customers and we should regularly seek out the gift of feedback. Armed with these insights, we can confidently answer the question and focus on the highest impact priorities.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.

Are You My Customer: a simple question that demands a strategic answer

It’s the holiday season and in the final countdown, it seems everyone is a customer. But in the world of business-to-business commerce, the basic question is oft debated in board rooms and strategy meetings: who is our customer? 

I often jokingly respond that the right answer to “who is our customer?” is “yes.” Especially if you sell complex solutions or through channel partners. But who’s voice is loudest in your “voice of the customer” that speaks into your offerings and strategies?

Seems simple enough, but for those of us who sell through channel partners or distributors or have products used by different people than those who buy, it can be a tricky question which requires a nuanced and highly strategic answer.  For instance, who is the “customer” of a diagnostic display used to detect cancer? The hospital CIO or the radiologist who uses it every day or the patient who benefits from the early diagnosis. Who is the “customer” of a publisher of a complex enterprise software tool that sell through consultants who add necessary professional services to provide a solution to the companies they find, cultivate, and service? Who is the “customer” of a lighting company who is marketed by independent reps, specified by architects, purchased through distribution by contractors, programmed by lighting designers, and maintained by corporate facilities departments or property managers? Or what about advertising-based models, where the “customer” (who is paying for advertising) and the “user” (who would really rather not have ads) are inherently at odds. The definitions of a customer can be dizzying.

And adding to this confusion is changing market dynamics in many industries. Management consultants will want to analyze profit pools to make channel optimization recommendations, all the while experienced sales people appreciate the loyalty of existing partners while market disrupters disintermediate channels using technology. Integrators, resellers, and dealers are consolidating in many markets. And manufacturers and service providers are left wondering whether their routes to market are efficient enough and capable of serving the needs of the end users effectively. And for strategic reasons, you must be informed by the past, but look to the future.

When you are start into a “who is my customer?” conversation, which can devolve into academic exercises and tribal territory defensiveness, here are three questions that should be asked to provide actionable clarity.

1.     Who sees the most value in our offering?

No matter where you are in the supply chain, there is someone out there that appreciates the value that you are producing between your “raw materials” and “finished goods.” So, who best appreciates what your product or services do and sees the productivity improvements, cost savings, or other tangible or intangible benefits of your offering? This may or may not be the entity with whom you are directly transacting. It is often likely to be a specifier or end user, but it could be a channel partner who sees your offering as part of their solution and ability to differentiate against their competition. The answer to this question has huge implications on product management, pricing strategies, and overall business approach. If the people that see the most value, are not in a position to pay for it, then it is difficult to monetize the differentiation you have built into your offering. And, of course, your offering today might not be what you are bring to market in the future and this discussion about who values and can afford the differentiation you are offering is a good input into your product roadmap.

I have lead products whose primary value proposition was to help integrator partners generate more profit with easier installation and easier service features. End users of the system didn’t necessarily have visibility to these features and were not willing to pay more, but the resellers and installers preferred the product strongly and were able to shape demand effectively and maintain a price premium. In other businesses, the value propositions are for the end user, and the channels are just there to fulfill demand created directly by the brand and help the brand influence at the point of purchase.

2.     Who best represents independent demand for our offerings?

One of the arguments for supporting channel partners is that they have customer relationships and can influence transactions to the point that they are essentially a customer and can take their business (or more precisely, the business of their captive customers) virtually anywhere they want. When Costco decides that they will only accept American Express, Visa and MasterCard are locked out and Costco members sign up for American Express credit cards. When Dell selects TechData for a multi-year distribution contract, Dell’s customers don’t know or care where their computer peripherals are being sourced. So, if you are PC peripheral brand who sells through distribution, who is your customer? In contract, when a homeowner calls their trusted “AV guy” to set up a home theater, they expect to hear recommendations and purchase product, even from brands they have never seen advertised. And when demand generation budgets are tight, it is very tempting to leverage channels (which you can pay in margin) to build demand that you otherwise can’t afford to cultivate on your own. Some channels are great at creating and shaping demand and others are best at fulfilling demand created by brands or manufacturers. 

I have seen incredible wealth created in partnership with channels who can create category and build demand. And I have seen other channels that can’t create demand on their own at all. Depending on your industry and the level of commodification, there may not independent demand represented by your channel partners, in which case you are not selling “to” channels as much as you are selling “through.” This question has huge implications on how demand generation money is invested.

3.     Do we transact with the most efficient partners to fulfill the demand?

During the consumer-driven holiday season, the challenges of the “who is my customer” question is well illustrated. In this season, we are consumers, but we are gift givers. We are transacting for others. Purchasing gifts that we might not have specified nor will we use.  Your 80-year-old grandmother might not be the best prospect to put on the mailing list of a skateboard shop, even though that is where she purchased a gift for her grandson this year. Even though she technically was the one writing the check. Gift givers are like the purchasing department at a company, who might be listed in the manufacturer’s database as the customer, but in fact, are not actual customers. Or like the role of a reseller or dealer who may just be taking orders and don’t have a real ability to make product recommendations or command any customer loyalty. They might not represent independent demand. They might just be an intermediary. And as an intermediary are they effectively and efficiently playing their role in the value chain? Are you paying a reseller a large margin percentage to transact orders you have cultivated yourself? Are you absorbing service costs because your channel can not service their customers effectively? 

These questions might lead you to answer the “who is my customer?” question with more purpose and confidence. The answer might not just be “yes” (ie, end users, channel partners, specifiers, influencers are all my customers), but it might be “no” (that we need to focus on just one or two of these groups to have the maximum impact). In fact, the real test of strategy is what you are saying “no” to and narrowing the voice of the customer and your definition of who you serve is a great place to start.

These are just a few of the questions that I have found most insightful when discussing channel strategies and customer experience approaches.  I would love to hear your ideas as well, so leave a comment or engage on my blog (www.atjenniferdavis.com) to continue the discussion. I wish you all a warm and wonderful holiday season!

Cover image is a parody of “Are You My Mother?” book, a classic children's book by PD Eastman.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.