56. How to change KPI chaos into customer bliss

Welcome to Unicorny. This is a podcast about the business of marketing, how to create value and how you can help your business win the future. And I'm your host, Dom Hawes. I'm feeling great today. Now, you may remember that in earlier seasons we featured the amazing Scott Stockwell, who spoke to us about Agile marketing. Well, when we first posted his episode on LinkedIn, things blew up a little bit and Nicola, our series producer, noticed today's guest was engaging with our posts. So Nicola visited, her profile was blown away by what she saw. Connected and bang, here we are today, speaking to Geraldine Tenton. Now, when we caught up with her, she was just coming to the end of a 20 year career at IBM and I'm gonna let her introduce herself to you in just a minute.

But first, let me frame what we're going to talk about together. My business, your business. All for profit businesses are there to help customers, to create value, to create sustainable growth, to return value to shareholders, and to create stimulating and rewarding experiences for their people. Now, while the tools we use every day are improving and should help businesses deliver on their purpose, something is missing in many corporations. Something is slowing them down. Something is making life harder than it probably should be. Now, I think the issue is companies are building dysfunction into their organisations and theyre not even realizing it. Theyre doing it by the way they build and scale departments within a hierarchy that creates fiefdoms, stage ownership and handoffs. Theyre doing it by operating disparate and sometimes competing remuneration models between departments that should instead be cooperating.

And they're doing it by applying ineffective KPI's short term ROI focus process based measurements instead of prioritizing the one that matters most. What's that? Listen on and you will find out. Geraldine. Welcome to the Unicorny project. As they say on tv. Who are you and where are you from?

Hello Dom, thank you very much for inviting me today to this unicorny podcast. I really love the Seri. So I'm Geraldine Tintain. I'm French. I'm actually from the technology industry. I've been in marketing and communications all my life. In fact, I worked with a startup. I spent also many years with IBM in different marketing positions. Among others, I led marketing in Canada. I've been leading the performance team in North America, moving to New York. How fun that a french person has the chance to do this. And then I came back to Europe and I really spent a lot of time here working with the DacH region and the entire european team.

Now I left IBM and I'm working with different companies, looking at different situations, and I'm also the co chair of the best of b, two b marketing and communications award in the DacH region from the german marketing association.

Wow. Now there's the resume. Before we get stuck into the meat of today's subject, I'd love to know, what was it like being a European? I'm going to call it a European. Being taken to America, into New York to lead a business unit there. That must have been amazing.

It was fabulous. And really it was lovely that I had the chance to first spent time with our canadian team. So I was already part of a north american organization, but one that is very much close to our european heart. And then getting into New York was fabulous. The speed, the business focus. When you make it in New York, you make it everywhere. Don't they say that?

They do, they do.

The fun of it.

Oh, blue eyes got it right. I always wanted to work in New York. I never quite found a way of getting there, but I was married in New York. Not quite the same as working. Anyway, enough of that. Let's get stuck into the meat of today's subject.

I framed the issue we're going to talk about in the introduction today's.

Show, but I think we're going to.

Go a little bit deeper now, businesses are building dysfunction into their organizations, their operations and their process. Today we're looking at three ways that we can be more effective. The first of those is the importance of measuring and achieving business outcomes from marketing activity. But before we explore the solution, Geraldine, why don't you explain the problem?

Well, the thing is, it's all about business and business development and growth. That's what every company wants to get. And too often it's easy to go the trap of execution without enough thinking and business alignment. So, being very clear upfront about what are we trying to achieve? Where will the growth come from? What are the elements that make this growth possible? Possible. Having clear heat maps, having a clear audience that we want to address, having clear solutions that are the one that will deliver the most revenue, drag along the most product and the better. Client satisfaction is really what matters. Because what you want is long term growth. You don't just want to hit and run. Here we go. I've got the lead, I've got a win and I'm done. I'm the king of the day.

That is an approach, but it won't take you very far. Having this alignment from the beginning, being able to reflect across the organization, from sales, from marketing, from technical sales and even support of the client and all the touch points being aligned I think is really important.

Me too, by the way. And I think you've hinted at the answer maybe already, but one of the things I think that paralyzes marketers because they're constantly being asked for proof, right? Because no one believes that marketing works is a different subject actually, and I'm going to deal with that in a different podcast. People don't know what marketing is, so they can't not believe it works because they don't know what it is. But we're constantly asked for proof, we're constantly asked for stats. And most of those by definition are going to be lagging indicators. I think customer satisfaction might help us lean towards leading indicators. But are there any other examples you can think of when we're talking about real outcomes that allow us to break our reliance on lagging and look instead for leading indicators?

You could be in a situation where you get the impression that you have a beautiful funnel, that it converts really nicely, that you have an audience that cares for what you're marketing, that actually the sale even works. But at the end of the day there's a problem and the client might not be so satisfied with what they have or they might not even be able to close because there's a pricing issue down the road. And I think these are the elements. If you fragment too much, you're going to be in a situation where, oh yeah, I have an audience, oh yeah, I have attention, oh, I'm getting leads and different companies use different terms. So maybe I'm going to say I'm getting to an MQL and I'm even having an SQL behind it.

Oh, and by the way, it looks like it's ready to close and maybe it's going to close and maybe the product is going to be not performing and it's going to come back to you. So you want to make sure you create happy customers and therefore you can't stop at the cell. And therefore you need to really understand all the aspects all along and then go beyond in your data and see if client buys a, will they buy b and c? What is the entry point that is going to be the best in order to expand and grow a client?

The pipeline thinking is deeply flawed, isn't it? It's very convenient for us to think in a nice little funnel shape and be able to sort of segment our own activity according to where customers or potential customers sit in that pipeline. But of course they don't sit in a pipeline, do they? And you know, human relationships are far more complex than we must first make them aware, then we must get them interested, then promote desire before they can act. It's very convenient, I think, to think that way. But I personally have been in many cases and I've, you know, I've seen it over my business career where all of the KPI's look perfect, but the customer, at the end of the day is not happy. And I love your focus that it's.

Actually all about happy customers.

How do you think an organization can coalesce and collaborate to make that its focus, rather than the endless run of KPI's that we all get measured by?

At the moment, you will still need KPI no matter what. Right? So if you've decided a happy customer is what matters the most, then definitely looking at this as a metric will be really important. So in my career I've been using net promoter score. I think it works then it depends on how it is deployed. In the case in which I operated, we had over 30 touchpoints, which is a very extensive use, probably the largest use of NP's in a b two B environment. And you want to monitor this, you want to understand all along what is it that is happening at all these various touchpoints? What are the elements of satisfaction, be it product wise, be it relationship wise, be it business partner wise, and you want to follow it.

And more importantly than the data is doing something about the data that matters. So it's easy to establish dashboards. It's much more difficult to change the culture and that's what you need to establish. How do you get the entire organization to put the client first to react within 24 hours if there's a challenge and really be on top and having a resolution mentality that breaks the silos in order to get to this happy crime?

Okay, let's pull over for a second and observe the view that Geraldine is giving us from her Alta vista. Happy customer lies far off in the distance. We can just about see it, but the way there is obscured. It's obscured by all those bloody KPI's. They're getting in the way. And I think that, folks, is our so what moment. At this stage, we need to stop looking at KPI's as the goal. They work much better as waypoints along the journey. If we define happy customers as the end point and we define what happiness looks like, then having some measurements along the way that can actually help us rather than divert us. That's probably a good idea. Here's Geraldine talking about this very thing.

It gives a common language for the organization. It helps everybody understand what's expected from them to do. They know where to look to have the insights that they need. And then you want to make sure that not only you have these data points, but that your churn is reducing, that your clients are staying longer and that they're expanding their footprint with your company. That's nothing is as clear as the wallet share that you get with the client.

Well, there you go. The ultimate proof of the pudding is, are your customers buying more? But this is really about a better understanding of the pipeline. Now, I've already said what pisses me off about pipeline misconceptions, but there's something else that really boils my stew, and it's this, if things aren't working well, or if we're not hitting industry norms, then the old cry goes up of we need more pipeline.

Really?

Is that what the issue is? Will getting more leads in at the top of a funnel solve anyone's problem? Let's get back on the road with Geraldine and hear what she has to say about this very subject.

I like to work on this with my teams and even building real case, fake case, work on it. To me, the first place to work on a funnel is the last conversion point. I think that before you want to pump more into your more pipeline or more at the top of the funnel, you need to make sure that it works all along, because it's very expensive to work the top of the funnel. Right. That's typically where companies are going to put their paid media, and I think there's a lot of mistakes happening at that level. So I'd rather start with, am I able to convert to the win? And what does it take to get there? Is this about enablement? Is this about a better alignment of sales, of marketing? Is this about warm handover? Have we considered that?

Maybe what we do is about an audience that performs under a group buying group as opposed to a single user buying process? So these are things that need to be worked and I'd rather work the funnel from the other way around. And once it's fixed, pump more at the top, because then I know my money will better invested. If it takes money.

Yeah. And it's astounding if you work your conversion rates all the way back. So if you do start, as you say, at the outcome, and then you start working back and you look at the various conversion points and you put your conversion metrics in, if you're not optimizing your conversion metrics, the audience you need in at the top is colossal, hence the expense.

I suppose sometimes it's larger than the market size. Did you?

Yeah, exactly. Well, in many, I think I've seen many cases where that is like the tam. The tam is like smashed to pieces, like it's just physically not possible. People like me, that's a fabulous situation to find because then obviously it means we need to do more research or reposition or do a little work like that. But anyway, so this also chimes very well with the work of Matt Dixon, who we interviewed on a former episode who wrote the jolt effect. And I was astounded, actually, with some of the updated research that he told us. And the jolt effect is all about, I don't know if you've read it, but it's all about how to overcome the no decision sales loss. So in his research, up to half of all sales are lost to no decision.

And in B two B SaaS, that's currently around 70%, largely because the audience you're selling to has a fear of messing up. So it's just easier for them not to do something like they want your solution, they want to buy, but they're scared to, therefore they don't. And I think if you're not therefore really optimizing your pipeline at the bottom of the metaphorical funnel, given that you're going to lose half of them anyway to FOMU, if you're not optimizing that, you are in for a very expensive and very wasteful time.

Let me tell you maybe something that can help our audience understand an element of what I mean, when you convert at the bottom of the funnel. So very often in these Andovers sales and marketing, it's about workload, right? You come to a point where you're going to provide some level of workload, and if you work it just on absolute value, you fool yourself, because they are different type of workload that a digital seller is going to take to work from, and they convert differently. So what has the client done so that it comes to become a workload? Have they written to you that they needed something? Have they reacted maybe in a live chat? Have they attended an event? Have they engaged in that event in a particular way around a particular product? What is it that they have done?

Have they downloaded a white paper? So you need to really understand, based on these things that have happened, what are the odds of conversion behind it and what is this mix of workload that you want to provide and what are the ones that your digital sellers are going to be the most successful with. And sometimes it's not even a digital sellers that you need. Sometimes it's a technical seller that is going to make a demonstration. So for each company it's quite different. But really understanding this, understanding the mix, understanding what is the best hand raising moment a client gives you to act upon is going to help you optimize and use your salesforce at the most valuable moment in that funnel. And I think that's the art of our work or the science maybe better.

And understanding those mix and taking the data you have, the data you can buy in order to get to the best combination for the ultimate outcome.

That's such a great way of looking at pipeline. And I used the phrase faux moo earlier, by which I meant fear of messing up. And that's a prevention to sell. But taking your approach to pipeline and looking at the individual workload, the needs of each individual, that's in the pipeline if we're totally focused on the right outcome. And the right outcome, by the way, is a happy customer. The right outcome is a happy customer that has a long life with your business. And one way you can grow if you think about that right from the very beginning and take into mind FOMU, that might inform then who you need in your team to help them across the line.

Before we move on, I'm interested in there's data everywhere these days, particularly for tech led companies and b two B SaaS being the obvious one where your product is live online. Can you give me examples of how real time data can be informed? We always hear, oh, you must use data to inform your decision making. Talking about as we have been just pre sale or just post sale maybe where you're trying to bed that in as a happy customer. Are there examples you can think of where real time data can be used to help inform your decision making to make all that stuff work better?

Part of that is the real time that allows you for an immediate interaction. I know we might talk about COVID a little bit later in this podcast, but in particular I'm thinking about a moment when were recreating a face to face experience in a digital environment because we couldn't meet face to face, particularly in the COVID days. And being able to allow reps to talk to their clients when they engage in the context of a virtual event was something really important to our teams and that we established here you have a client joining an event at a point in time looking at something you want to let your seller know this is happening, you want to let the right person know this is happening.

So this is an example of real time behavior, maybe more than real time data, for which I'm going to go outside the platform. I'm going to send a text message so that in case my seller was busy doing something else and hey, it's time to come here. In this event, your client is here engaging on that come and talk to this person. That makes a huge difference.

Real outcomes in marketing and that's marketing with a capital m, as in the process of successfully taking a product or service to market. That can be achieved in many ways. How do you measure that success? That's not always so easy. But a proxy for success could in fact should be customer happiness. And this leads us to an area that's thorny for some. It's thorny because of where we started. Today, our organizational structures set us at odds with the very people we should be collaborating with. Let me put that another way. Creating value for each of a business's three main stakeholders, customers, shareholders and colleagues, is best achieved by striving for unified customer experience. Be one thing to your customer, not more. That's an easy thing to say.

It's not so easy to deliver, especially as the way we've organized many of our businesses, literally booked colleagues that should be collaborating in competition with each other. It's probably not lost on you. I'm really talking here about sales and marketing. Listen to any other marketing podcast and you'll hear people talking about marketing ROI, marketing as a profit center, marketing success being measured by revenue and so on. Now, there are of course, times and circumstances when some of these might be more or less appropriate. But for the most part I think they distract us from the big objective. So our first solution to sustainable growth being stymied by built in dysfunction is to focus and measure the marketing effort on real outcomes, happy, long term and profitable relationships, not waypoints like KPI's.

Now don't get me wrong, KPI's are important, but they're the journey, not the destination. And to do that, you have to remove the competing priorities between your sales and marketing functions. How do I do that? I hear you cry. Well, we're going to take a look.

At that in part two.

You have been listening to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalised business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairlie is the series producer. Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor. Peter Powell is our script writer and editor. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.