We have known for quite some time that employee experience and customer experience are closely interlinked, and the data is quite unequivocal about it. In this insightful episode, Tiffani Bova, a renowned growth and innovation evangelist, delves into the intricacies of The Experience Mindset. Co-author of the bestselling book, Growth IQ, Tiffani shares invaluable perspectives on how organizations can strike a balance between customer and employee experiences to drive sustainable growth. Drawing on her extensive experience, she discusses the profound impact of employee engagement on customer satisfaction, shedding light on the key elements that contribute to a positive employee experience and its ripple effect on overall business success. Join us as we navigate the realms of leadership, technology, and culture with Tiffani, offering listeners actionable insights for fostering an environment where both employees and customers thrive.
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The Experience Mindset: Mastering The New Battleground For Sales Leaders With Tiffani Bova
Tiffani, how are you?
I'm good. How are you? Thanks for having me.
First of all, it’s so nice to have you. Thank you so much for joining. Such an exciting topic we're going to have. We’re talking about The Experience Mindset, a book I super enjoyed. I also enjoyed Growth IQ, which was Tiffani's prior book from a couple of years back. They are both fantastic books. Tiffani, let's do a proper introduction for you. I’ll take a look at your bio here. There are so many reasons I love my job and this interview is a perfect example of one of them. Getting to chat with folks like Tiffani, when you look through the bio, it's mind-boggling.
Tiffani is the Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. Over the past two decades, Tiffani has led large revenue-producing organizations at businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500. She's been a research fellow at Gartner, where some of her cutting-edge insights helped Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, HP, IBM, and Oracle.
She is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the first book I showcased, Growth IQ. We had a wonderful chat with Tiffani maybe a year ago about that book. All of her ideas have been published in outlets from Harvard Business Review, which we always love on this show, all the way through to Fast Company. Here's the wild one. She's been named a Top 50 Business Thinker in the world twice. We've had a number of guests from the Thinkers50 group. We're always so delighted they do it. Tiffani's been on that list twice, like a few of our other pals.
She's also the host of the podcast What's Next with Tiffani Bova. Also, fantastic podcast. That's one to check out. We'll go through all those links. We'll talk about all those things as well at the end of the show. We're going to do a real deep dive into The Experience Mindset. That took a lot of effort. Tiffani, welcome to the show. If you do any more stuff, we can't have you on the show. The bio is too long. We can't get it in.
Thank you for the kind introduction. There's a lot to the bio. It depends on who the audience is. I think the part you might have left out is I am a recovering seller. I sold technology for a number of years, so my heart lies in the selling community.
Everybody on the show is going to love you for that one. I know you've spoken to him multiple times, but we always love Dan Pink's book To Sell is Human. We're all in sales, so everybody is selling in some capacity. There's no apology or bad word with the term selling. It's management consulting these days.
Let's jump into the book. Here's one of those things when you read great books. First of all, I got to call it out very tactically. Both of your books are so beautifully designed. I read hundreds of books for the guests on the show in a given year. It does jump out at me the way the book is designed. It's such a friendly read and that's an important thing because you also have real depth of research.
It's a bit of a bibliography for a masterclass. We're going through writing our first book, so I'm always checking these things out. It's a beautiful-looking book. The stat that hits you, folks, in the first couple of pages, companies with high customer experience and employee experience exhibit three-year compound annual growth rates. Their CAGR is almost double that of those with lower customer and employee experiences.
The group with high customer experience and employee experience, 8.5 CAGR, Compounded Annual Growth Rate, those with low, 4.3. That's the showcasing stat upon all this data and the rest of the book starts to explain why. Did you have this point of view beforehand or was this an epiphany for you when you went through the two years of research?
Let me start by going back to the comment about the feel of the book. It is one of the things that I hear most often like, “That was amazing. I never thought about that.” People will literally say like, “I loved the entire feel of the book.” It's approachable, easy, and light if you will. I spent a lot of time on that because being a salesperson, we have a short attention span. We want to get into whatever it is we need to get to so we can move on. We don't have a lot of time. If it's too long-winded and repetitive, you start to lose people. I was given some amazing advice when I was first writing my first book, Growth IQ. It was write the book you would want to read.
I read a ton of books from Dan Pink and Seth Godin and others that I follow. I'd say, “What did I like? What captured me? What captivated me? What kept me engaged? I want to do that. What lost me a little bit or what wasn't as approachable?” I'm a visual learner, so I write stories in the book, but I had them sketched so that people like me who are visual learners could see the story. I underlined it because you may not read the whole page. I won't be offended, but you'll go to what's important. At the end of the chapter, I’ve told you what I’ve told you and I’ve given you some questions, so you might not read the whole chapter. I’ve tried to give the multitude of ways people enjoy, learn, and read access to the book. Thank you for saying that because I worked hard at it
Onto the question about the research. For those of you who read Growth IQ, it was ten paths to growth and it was a culmination of being in sales, marketing, and customer service or customer success for almost fifteen years. Individual quota-bearing sales rep, all the way up to running a division of a Fortune 500 company. I went the gamut and I was very early in the cloud. I spent ten years at Gartner. During that time, my area of coverage was sales transformation. Again, my love of sales. During the 25 years that that was of me being a practitioner and then an academic, I landed in these ten paths.
Sixty thousand words in that book. The very first path was customer experience. It's the True North. It's where you have to focus, be customer-centric, be customer-obsessed, and all those statements. I might've mentioned employee a handful of times in the 60,000 words, maybe 150 words, maybe. I'm giving myself probably a little more credit than is due.
I would then say to you that it was a miss. Fast forward, I'm working here at Salesforce. I'm standing on stage in Canada at an event. I said, “I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce is a great place to work globally, one of the most innovative companies in the world, and the fastest-growing enterprise software company.” Once it left my mouth, let me be clear, I'm not the first to say it.
Happy employee, happy customer. You get that right, you grow greater. I'm not the first to say it, but could I prove it? That was the first research we did. It’s with Forbes Insight. It was US-based only. We looked at publicly traded companies and the stat that came out is what you identified. We looked across Glassdoor ratings, S and P growth rates, CAGRs over three years, NPS scores and ENPS scores, attrition rates and retention rates, and all those things. We then said, “What does it tell us?” Sure enough, those companies that have both high C and high E had faster growth rates.
Happy employee, happy customer. You get that right, you grow greater.
As you mentioned, if you don't have both, you're still growing. It was something like 427 or 487, something like that. If you had low E or low C and high C and high E, you were in a mixed category, but if one of them was low, you were still growing. This is not if you're not doing both, you're not growing. The statement here is if you do both and you do both well, you get a flywheel effect or the ripple effect of the goodness of both employee and customer experience. That's where we saw those accelerated growth rates.
This flywheel is an interesting concept. Beautifully explained, by the way. I will go back to that design response. Before we jump into the flywheel, when you look at those images, what's dawning on me is it's a good way of trying to communicate when you're in a meeting instead of PowerPoint, which is destroying everything. When you're communicating with a client, you might want to the book and look at how Tiffani summarizes what happened at Zappos, IBM, or Starbucks.
There's this picture that captures everything in a very nice way. You can almost imagine capturing your value proposition or the ROI or the impact on your solution to that business. There's the financials and the Excel, but the story to those visual learners who are looking for a better future, I love the idea of having somebody on the team who can do that. Maybe doing it on a whiteboard in real-time would be spectacular.
We've all seen it. Someone’s speaking and then capturing it in images on the side. It's a great way. Storytelling is an art. I can read an article about let's say a case study, but if I have a conversation with the executive, and let's say it's the exact same story and they add no more color, I will always remember the conversation much longer than I remember what I’ve read. It's that listening and visual learning. I think that that's all of us, but salespeople in particular. Writing a long email or responding to an RFP is a very flat medium. It's up for interpretation.
It might be too verbose, too short, or misinterpreted, but if you can have a conversation, you can pick up on those cues. A conversation, if you get the opportunity, is always better. The images are also a way for it to be remembered. It's about retaining, remembering, and being able to then share back what you've heard because that executive that you are pitching to, giving a sales call to, or whatever it might be, is going to eventually have to tell what you've told them to somebody else.
If they then misrepresent it or if they say, “He or she gave me this great story of how a client did this then that resonated with me. I wanted to learn more.” She set up a call and then I spoke to that client. Now all of a sudden, it's memorable versus your competitor who just answered in an email. We don't always get that opportunity. I get it. We have to follow our customers' leads, but if you get that opportunity, always jump on it because some people prefer email communication, and that's their mode of communication. You respect that. If you find somebody where they're more engaging and engaged in a human conversation, a story, or a customer in front of them, take advantage of it.
Tiffani, let's talk through a couple of the different chapters here and talk about the mindset, the model that takes us through the people, process, technology, culture, and all those kinds of good things. This is the culmination of the flywheel of customer experience and employee experience. You start in chapter one with the customer experience, and you talk about these characteristics. You summarize these characteristics of a superior customer experience. It's efficient, personalized, predictive, proactive, flexible, responsive, and value-based.
Let's talk about some of the key insights from this. We don't ignore the customer experience. It's critically important and you reference people like Zappos, Best Buy, and a few others. Tell us a little bit about the importance of the customer experience before we do that deeper dive into this less-discussed topic of the importance of employee experience along with it.
As I mentioned, I was very early in the cloud.
Great timing, by the way.
It was the World Wide Web back then and let's call it 1999 to 2004. I was early. The very first domain name I ever sold to a company was in 1997. I bought my first domain in 1998. I’ve been on this journey for a hot minute. I would say that we have spent decades. I can remember in the early 2000s, I was Eloqua’s beta client. I was a constant contact beta client. Back then, what we were trying to solve was moving people from the Yellow Pages, radio, print ads, and mailers to this digital thing on a computer. People moved and shifted a brochure from offline to online. They're like, “I'm done.”
People realized, “I can sell things online?” When we first started doing commerce online, it was like ten clicks to buy something. We worked very hard to reduce the effort for the customer to increase their experience. Ten clicks to nine clicks to eight clicks. Eventually, we got to three clicks. That was the golden rule. Fast forward, let's call it maybe 17 or 18 years, then it was one click with a very large online retailer. Now it’s almost no click. You can voice order from a device. It was always about reducing friction, personalization, and predictive. All of the words and terms you used that I identified in the book.
That was the remit of marketing. It was about journey mapping and customer advisory boards and how we anticipate what our customers may want next from us. How do we build so that when they show up, we're waiting for them with whatever it is that they may need? They don't even know what they need. It’s very Steve Jobs. We're watching what they need as analytics and data become more prevalent. Whatever it might be, we were analyzing, deconstructing, and journey mapping everything about that customer to reduce effort, remove friction, make it seamless, and all those words we use in order to improve the experience. If we improve the experience, we would all say, “If you improve the experience, you will grow.”
Net promoter score goes up, and we see the recency of purchase go up. Net promoter score goes up, and we see basket sizes go up. We see the NPS score go up, and we see lifetime value go up. Whatever your metrics are, we started to get smarter about that. About 2008, when I was at Gartner, we made the prediction that the chief marketing officer was going to spend more on technology than the chief information officer. This was 2008. People thought we were a little nuts, but it wasn't about the technology. It wasn't about search engine optimization or digital advertising. It was real tech.
They were building their own tech stacks. They were hiring UI designers and application developers, and they were buying servers, storage, and networking. They were investing in tech because they wanted to control and have a better experience for the customer. It wasn't about tech. It was about the experience layer because we believed the experience was going to be that next battleground for brands to fight instead of price, which the race to zero is never a good strategy.
Experience Mindset: Experience a better battleground for brands to fight instead of price. The race to zero is never a good strategy.
From 2008 to 2016, I joined Salesforce to hone in on the power of CX and everything that was focused on that. We advocated for getting the CMO at the C-suite. We advocated for having the voice of the customer. We advocated investing in technology around things that are experience-based. That was a very successful activity set. That led me to that comment and that led me to the journey that I went on that then required me to think, I think I have “an 11th path.” That was the employee experience, which I know we'll talk about next, but customer experience is important. We have to focus on it. It's critical. Always keep the customer in mind. It is a good strategy for customer centricity, customer focus, or whatever terms you want to use. However, there is an and that I dug into in The Experience Mindset.
Two thoughts there. One of these epiphanies comes to you when you're on stage. I think it was in Vancouver. You mentioned it in the book. I'm in Toronto and one of the things about Canadians is they get a good taste of both because we have very large regulated industries that don't allow you folks to come in and compete.
Telco and banking. There is one type of experience there and there isn't a focus on CX with love, but they have a regulated industry. They're not worried about market share. They've got the market share. They're worried about risk. There's one experience there. Canadians buy everything online in the US, and now we have those experiences as well. We buy lots of things. We vacation, go through, and understand these things.
You see the importance of that experience. Particularly in protected industries or regulated industries, they understand it isn't a priority one. However, those regulated industries, do care about number two, which is the employee experience, chapter two. You start this chapter off with a quote from one of our pals from this show.
Roger Martin has been on the show once, if not twice. Also a Canadian. Thank you. He says, “Your top employees aren't simply doing a job for you. They create outcomes that wouldn't be possible if they disappeared.” You let that sink in a little bit. We hear all of these great stories of great organizations that put huge value on their employees. The Enderman research reveals that 74% of institutional investors agreed that a company's ability to win the best talent is more important in gaining investors' trust than the ability of that company to attract new customers or increase valuation multiples.
That's an interesting one. How many clients have you and I both worked with that care about nothing but increasing that valuation multiple? This is where the meat of this experience mindset is. We're now talking about the employee experience, and you've got your perspective on The Great Resignation. Let's talk about some of the great findings there.
I'm not a fan of the term The Great Resignation. I call it in the book The Great Reflection. I like that better. I think people didn't just sit back and resign to what was happening or resign, “I'm giving up.” It was more of a reflection of, “I don't want to do this anymore. I have no joy. I'm not getting paid enough. I don't like the place I work. I don't like the people I work with. I don't like the commute. I want to start my own business.” Whatever the reason, I feel like it's more positive for the employee. Maybe not great for the employer but for all intents and purposes, people are taking a little bit more control when they could.
I want to be clear here. A caveat to all this is I am not a people expert nor am I a culture expert. This experience mindset is focused on the intersection at the moment that matters when a customer and an employee interact. That interaction might be in person. It might be digital or it might be with no person. What I mean by that is it might be the UI design on the website or the app. That is an interaction between a brand and a customer that a human-designed.
If the human didn't design it well and it's still ten clicks or it's clunky, you got to find your way through something. If it's not intuitive, that has a negative impact on the customer experience. Why did that employee design that UI poorly? Were they rushed? Were they not managed properly? Did they not know the expectations? Were they dissatisfied with work and frustrated, so it showed Itself in the design? Is it they weren't willing to do the work or go the extra mile? What was the reason?
There's a reason it was not designed properly or there's a reason the call center rep is short on the phone. Maybe they're having a bad day. Let's put those aside. Are they short because this is the 75th time today they've had to answer this one question and they've been telling their managers like, “If we could put FAQs up on the website, it would cut off 50% of these calls I get every day because it's simple, basic questions but there’s no other way for our customers to get that information?” That call center rep tells their manager, and their manager does nothing. That call center rep is taking the calls day after day monotony. There's no creativity, no value, and no critical thinking. “I'm bored out of my mind. I'm collecting a paycheck,” i.e., quiet quitting.
What is the reason that something is happening? That's where you can uncover how you can improve the employee experience. That moment that matters. While things like compensation, equity, and inclusion are very important, it’s not covered in this book. It is at the intersection of what are the things that keep employees engaged, satisfied, willing to do the work, feel like they're getting invested in, their managers are supporting them, have career development, and their psychological safety.
It’s whatever terms you feel in that employee bubble that so when they show up, they show up not only with their best selves but also doing their best work. You've inspired them to do that because of the mindset you have around the importance of that employee. They're not just an asset or a line item that if they leave, you'll just replace.
I think over the last few years, we've realized that's not a great strategy either because good talent is hard to recruit and retain. Ultimately, you needed to make sure that you put the same level of effort and rigor behind what you do for employees that we have done for decades for customers. That is this whole concept when you make a decision for a customer, what is the intended or unintended consequence to an employee?
As we reduced effort for customers and increased the experience, what ended up happening or the unintended consequence was the effort for the employee went up. Let me pick sellers as an example. In a million years, would we ever ask our customers to jump through five tabs on their website, mobile phone, or tablet to order something from us? One tab to find the product, one tab to order, one tab to enter payment information, one tab to enter shipping information, and one tab to track the order. Would we ever do that?
Of course not. Too long. We'll lose them. They'll get fatigued from the journey and away they go.
Unfortunately, how many salespeople have to jump between multiple applications to do their job? Find the customer information. The CRM system might be different from the quote-to-cash system, which might be different from the lead management system, which might differ from others. It's not lost on me. I work at Salesforce. I understand. We could do it all in one app on one UI.
It's not that technology can't do it. It's that someone made a decision somewhere that they thought it was a better strategy to have multiple. It's not about one provider or one vendor, or a customer 360 in our world where it's a single source of truth powered by us. There is an integration that you can do where that single pane of glass may be fed from multiple vendor applications.
To the seller, it's one interface. The amount of time that sellers spend selling is still 28% of their time spent in selling. We are overwhelming our people with things that are not what we're paying them to do. It's administrative, tactical, and repetitive. It could be improved so significantly if sales leaders had the time and space to reimagine those processes with the seller in mind, not just the metrics.
What a beautiful example but we won't go down this path too far because now you get me on my soapbox. If sales leaders had the time and space, which they don't, with an eighteen-month tenure before they get taken out of their job. They're also highly confused with 6,000 different platforms in the sales tech stack. They're always hoping for the next silver bullet that makes all of this easy. The truth of it is you have to be better at live conversation to make this easy.
Yes and no. I agree with having a live conversation. I don't want to negate that, but in Growth IQ, I had a chapter on sales optimization. I coined a term called the Seller's Dilemma. It was a play on Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma. That was intentional. The seller's dilemma is as a leader, how do I manage the business day to day? If I don't, I won't have a job. What are my numbers right now versus how do I optimize my business? How do I transform some of these things by eliminating multiple applications? How do I do integration? How do I innovate at the same time? If I don't hit numbers, to your point, it's an eighteen-month tenure, I won't have my job.
I'm working on something that I will never get the fruits from that labor. I'm going to keep my head down and keep doing what I'm doing. That's the space in time. This is where in The Experience Mindset, I challenge leaders. I don't care if you're a team manager of 2 or 5 people, a director, or a chief revenue or head of sales. I don't care how many people you have, but if you could ask one question, what one thing could I do to give you time back and reduce the effort in your job so that you could spend more time doing what I’ve hired you to do? i.e., let's say selling. If you ask that question as a leader, you have to be willing to listen and then act.
If all of a sudden, you ask everybody in their one-on-ones one question and then you take that back and then your job is don't we always say like, “My job, I'm here for you to remove obstacles.” That's what we say. Remove the obstacles. Pick one. Don't try to fix everything. The next week, ask them a process problem like, “Is there a process that you think is broken or no longer necessary? Can we eliminate that process?” One by one, it's one thing. The second thing I'd say is, and this is specific to CRM, we have asked our sellers to enter information. This is part of this employee experience. You have to enter information. Not that Salesforce doesn't count that kind of thing or that kind of approach.
It's your one-on-one time. You're sitting down with your seller. I sit in front of you and I'm like, “Mark, tell me about this account.” In my head, I'm like, “I stayed late last night and entered everything into Salesforce. He asked me the question, which meant he didn't look. Why am I entering all this information?” Versus taking the information and as a manager, looking at it and spending your time coaching and mentoring and looking for ways to improve versus the administrative tactical. If you don't think that's a true statement and you think you're doing it, there's a Bain study that shows that the majority of time is spent on administration and not on coaching and mentoring. That gives the employee experience a negative hit.
Now I'm like, “They don't care enough to look at what I'm entering into the CRM system. Why am I spending time doing it?” It's this dissatisfaction. “No one cares, I'm just grinding. I'm wasting my time.” We get into that bad habit. When a seller is on the phone with a customer, it's not a great experience for anybody. I'm short. I'm like, “Yeah, whatever. It doesn't matter.” Customer's like, “Sales rep doesn't care. If they don't care, I don't care. I'm going to go with someone else.” Those small little things have huge impacts. The time and space is a behavior change for managers.
It's huge and the executives managing those leaders. The other thing you talked about is coaching. I firmly believe and agree that one of the main issues is the fact that they don't coach. I don't think they know how to coach because that's a different skillset. It's also a different joy. You and I were talking at the beginning. You said, “One day you'd love to be back as a professional salesperson. If that came to pass, you'd love it.” Leaders get their joy not from closing deals but from seeing other people develop. That's why we run a sales training company. That's our buzz, which is seeing somebody get better. It is different. Gretzky could never coach. He wanted to be that salesperson.
The coach has got to be somebody who gets joy out of developing somebody else, rather than seeing everybody as a cog in the wheel to increase their productivity as a sales leader. You're just somebody retiring quota. I will show a lot of love to salespeople. I’ve seen the Bain research. To sales leaders, this is a tough job. In my view, it's the hardest job on the executive team today and the scoreboard is public domain.
Nobody else around the executive team has their performance evaluation on a public scoreboard that everybody in the company can see, but sales leaders do, which is what drives that quarterly cadence all the time saying, “Instead of coaching them on one-on-one, I better default to opportunity management and tell them what to do with the deal. I better get that deal this quarter because I won't be around next quarter if it doesn't happen.”
Tiffani, before we go down, I want to finish with the rest of a couple of other key items in your book, if that's okay. Back on this employee experience rather than our chat about the sales leaders, I want to go back to that employee experience because you call out this migration of moving from B2B or B2C to going B4C and then B4E. I love all the terms in your book, too. If we say the employee experience is so important and you say you're not an expert on culture, we speak about culture in the book.
We talk about the people process, culture, and technology. You and I both love Seth Godin's stuff. You interviewed Seth on your podcast and I loved your discussion with Seth on his latest book, The Song of Significance. Right at the beginning of the book, he talks about asking 10,000 people to describe the conditions of the best job they've ever had. You could pick multiple things on that list. It's not just one, it's multiple.
The top four that came back were, “I surprised myself with what I could accomplish. I could work independently. The team built something important,” which ties into what you speak about so eloquently in terms of vision later in the book, and then “People treated me with respect.” I know you say you're not an expert on this, but I think there's this interesting tie around the employee experience.
Some folks in mid-sized companies see work with that challenge around holding people accountable, but still making sure they have a great experience. What are your thoughts on the balance or that balancing act between those two things? Two of the ones in Seth's book came back saying, “It's important that I accomplish something meaningful.” They appreciate being coached to elevate performance.
I totally understand why we don't want to get caught in the nits and nats of that sales conversation because it's about the experience mindset. I'm going to take it back to that to answer this question, because a high-performing seller, i.e., Wayne Gretzky.
Yeah, thank you. We appreciate the Canadian references.
You said it. He wasn't necessarily a great coach. Just because you're a high-performing seller doesn't mean you're going to be a great leader or a great manager. I'm going to take myself as an example. I was a high performer. I always hit quota. I got promoted. Along the way, no one invested me in coaching and mentoring me on how I can coach and mentor other people. I was almost set up to not be successful as a great manager.
Now let's go back to how I felt I could work independently. I felt I was part of a team. That requires a great manager to create that environment. Are we investing in managers as they promote? You hit this Peter principle, which is you reach the level of your incompetence, meaning you don't know how to do what you've been asked to do or promoted to do. That is the culture of the business in investing in its talent to give it the tools and capabilities the individuals need to be successful in their roles.
You don't just wake up and you're a manager. I don't know this story because we picked Wayne, but did Wayne try to coach his teammates who were playing for his team as a coach the way he was coached, or did he expect them to play as he played? Was he working with a coach to help him be a better coach and a better manager and see how to get out of that player mentality into, “I'm not a seller anymore. I'm a manager.” It is about closing those deals. You said something. You said, “The joy we get is in lifting others up.” That is a very different mentality than, “I'm out killing deals. I'm competitive. I want to win. I'm running through fire for my customers and I'm going to hit quota and I'm going to go to the club.”
That's very different than, “No. I want to create people who are going to take my job because if I do a good job, they rise up.” That is a very different mentality. Investing in people, and career development, and know that I matter and that if I get an opportunity, that is all part of the employee experience we went after. We dug into what are the attributes and elements of the employee experience that will have the greatest impact on a customer. It was things like, “Do I feel like I have the appropriate tools and systems?”
I’ll give you a stat. We'll go back to tech for a second. Fifty-two percent of the C-suite believe the technology that employees use is effective in doing their job. This is a global study. That means 48% of the C-suite don't believe that they have the right technology deployed. There are trillions of dollars spent, billions on customer experience, billions in the sales stack and martech space. This is all up not just martech, but 52% believe that it is effective.
You don't just wake up and you're a manager. You have to be willing to have a beginner's mind and develop yourself.
Only 32% of the general employee base agrees with that statement. There's already a 20% delta between what the C-suite thinks and what the general employee population thinks. Only 20% of customer-facing employees agree that the technology they've been providing allows them to be effective and collaborate with their teammates.
What do businesses do? They make stuff. They sell stuff. What do businesses want to do? Earn money and profitability. Yet those responsible or those customer-facing employees are the least satisfied with the technology that's being provided. Why is that? That has huge implications for employee satisfaction and engagement. We have incredibly high numbers of dissatisfaction. When we double-clicked underneath some of the attributes, it was seamless technology.
It was siloed groups and breaking down those silos. There was a lack of integration between tools. Hopping between multiple tools. It was a lack of career development. “I want you to invest in me. I care and I want you to care. I want to work here. I love this company. I love who I work for, but I don't want to do the same thing every day for five years. I want opportunity.”
This is where leaders have to listen better. As leaders, we have to be willing to have a beginner's mind as well and go develop ourselves so that we can show up and help mentor, coach, lift up, identify, train, and skill the next generation even if it's to take your job. If they take your job, then you're moving on. If you're a good manager, you're going to keep moving up. In sales, unfortunately, it tends to be revenue-based that triggers that they should be promoted, versus they're a great manager, mentor, coach, or leader. People rally and they're engaged in their business with their customers. There's a lot more. As classic hardcore sellers, it's a very different mindset to flip the switch from, “I'm a competitive individual,” to “We're competitive as a team.”
There are also high-performing salespeople who are spectacular teammates. There are super high-performing salespeople who are not good teammates, no different than athletics. The Gretzky analogy, everybody here plays hockey. Of course, we all did. You knew those superstars that were in the league, but I don't want them on my team. There's a difference there. Can I backtrack? I'd like to double-click on something so important that you've touched on and this floored me in the book. This was another stat.
High-performing salespeople can be spectacular teammates or not good teammates, just like in athletics.
One of the things I love so much about The Experience Mindset is it’s not opinion but facts. Data matters in professional sales today and everything we're talking about here, there's great research and background, but it's that employee engagement. I may get the numbers wrong. I don't have right it in front of me here. Let's say ballpark 33% of employees are engaged, 17% were actively disengaged, or something of that nature. Almost 1 in 5 is actively disengaged. The definition is scary, but did it lead to a cost to business? Was it annually $17 billion? Do I have that number right? I don't want to put you on the spot.
I don't remember the exact number, but it was mind-boggling.
I was flabbergasted.
There's another one which is the amount of time that we as humans spend mentally switching when we switch applications. The enterprise has an average of a little more than 1,000 unique applications internally and only 27% of them are integrated. Who bears the brunt of that lack of integration? If you remember my comment, we've never asked customers to go and click through five applications, yet we ask our employees to do it every day all day.
If you go from one tab in Google to another tab in Google, or you go from Slack to Salesforce and you're going between those two applications, even though your eyes see that you've switched applications, it takes a couple of milliseconds for your brain to catch up. Over the course of a week, in a given day, how many times do you switch between applications? It's like 400 or 500 times you're switching between applications.
To go to Google, start a Zoom, get on LinkedIn, or whatever you're going to do, the switching is a little less than four hours a week in that just millisecond switching. Integration has implications. All of these things, which is why in The Experience Mindset, I broke it down to people, which is organizational training, career development, and all the things we've been talking about. The second is process. What is the process of doing something? Quote to cash, how many steps?
There's a company in Toronto I was working with, a very large retailer there and it was twenty minutes for a return for a call center agent. Do you think they wake up every day and go, “I'm so excited, I'm going to do 30 returns. I can't wait.” How do we reduce the steps and the broken processes? The next is tech, which we talked about. They don't think it's working effectively, the switching time, and all the things we mentioned. The fourth was culture. PPT is a very famous framework. It was the leave it diamond many decades ago in the 1960s. I added C for culture, so it's PPTC. I broke it down. Any leader that's tuning in to this would be like, “Do I have the right people?”
To your point, I can't have all high performers. I can't have all low performers. There was a great article that I read that was a very high trade in the NBA or the US National Basketball Association from the championship team, from the Denver team to another team. He wasn't a star scorer. He was a great bench player and he was a great collaborator. He was a great passer. He was a great teammate. Highly valuable. He’s not the top performer, but the one who made the team click. They paid a lot of money for that person. Not a well-known name, but a critical part of their winning story.
What does the team look like? How do I improve the process? That's an area. You could ask that one question. Give yourself the time and space in the process. In technology, it's hard for an individual contributor to fix the tech stack. We don't have much control over that. As a leader and a manager, it's also difficult for you. If you are a senior leader, then I'd get with your IT team and be like, “We have to simplify this stack. Let's do it together.” Pull in sales ops, marketing ops, rev ops, or whatever you have. The fourth one is culture. How does your organization view its employees? Are they a cost center or is it value? Is that something that's set at the top and then accountable all the way through the organization?
It's also the way that people will say, “It might not be great right now, but I trust it will get better.” That is a way I have found. I can't digest all of it at one time. I'd be caught in that seller's dilemma. It's too much to navigate. If I can deconstruct it into categories, then I can focus on a few things over time. A year from now, the people, the process, the tech, and the culture will look very different.
That’s great coaching and counsel for those first steps. In each of those categories, how do we move the needle the most without feeling overwhelmed or paralyzed by the paradox of choice? Tiffani, I found a stat in my notes that is going to knock both of us off our socks. The percentage of employees that have been engaged in companies has not changed, according to your research, since 2007.
That was Gallup's research.
Thank you. Since 2007, 32%. It stays the same.
Fairly flat, yes.
What's climbing is the percent that is actively disengaged, 17%, and it costs the global economy $7.8 trillion annually. Just shocking.
If you're tuning in to this, you're going to be like, “I can't show up to my manager or my leader and be like, ‘This is costing us $7.2 trillion. I read this book.’” It has to be something very tactical. That's where you can say, “Do you know what I did?” Once again, to the audience of sellers, unfortunately, there's only one thing a salesperson can control. We may think we have more control. We don't. We don't control our compensation plan, the products we sell, the prices, or the tools we use. We have very little control. What we can control is how we show up. That we can control. If you could take it upon yourself to say, “I'm going to track over the course of the week where I'm spending my time.”
On your next one-on-one go, “I'm trying to become more productive. I want to hit the quota. I want to go to the club. I want to be better. I identified these three things. Could you help me with these three things?” Instead of waiting for your manager to come and show up and ask you or waiting for your manager to fix it, be proactive and say, “Here are three things I could use some help on.”
Let's do it across people, processes, tech, and maybe culture. Culture might be a little too far out of the realm on this one. Let's even focus on process and tech. Let's not talk about people unless people for you are, “I want to be trained,” or “I want to go to a class,” or “I want to do something to improve my performance. Would the company invest in me doing that?” Now you show up. Now you've asked. Now let's hypothetically say your leader goes, “Thank you. This is so fantastic. Let's put together a quarter plan.”
“Let's do a career plan this quarter. Let's give you some time back to plan this quarter. Every week when we meet, we're going to talk about the plan. In the last ten minutes, we'll talk about the deals we're working on. For the first twenty minutes, we're going to talk about your plan.” What a beautiful thing. You could be proactive and take ownership of that. Let's say you do that to your manager and they have no interest in doing it, which is going to happen to some of you. They have no interest in doing it. Now what? Now you may find yourself falling into the quiet quitting. You might fall into the, “I'm going to leave.” You then might fall into the, “Now what do I do? I listened to Tiffani. I took this advice. I did it and boom, it didn't happen.” Do you just give up?
That's where salespeople are fantastic because we have grit. We're resilient. We will keep trying. We will find different ways. You might say, “If you are not going to help me.” Maybe those aren't the words you use but, “If they're not going to help me, would you mind if I went to sales ops and I work with them? Do you mind if I go and ask to be coached over here?”
If they're not willing to do it, can you find another answer? If it's flat-out no, that's where you have to make your own decision of, “Is this still right for me?” That's that reflection. Some people, it's unfortunate with the economy and everything going on, they have to keep working. They don't have the luxury of leaving and quitting and looking for something else. If you do and you can, maybe that's a signal to you that you want more out of where you work and who you work for.
I think people always have to make a smart decision there. I would go back to those questions you suggested. If the manager comes back and says no, then there's this reasonable question about why. Did I ask for something that we can't get into the budget this term or this quarter? Are there good and logical reasons for what's taking place? Are they diminishing this idea or it doesn't make sense now because we've already got these three technology projects underway and so on and so forth?
I encourage the proactivity of saying, “How can I help my leaders help me?” Certainly, the coaching I would've given my younger self 15 or 20 years ago is other people have other things on their plate as well. I understand why is it you don't agree that this would be helpful or is it given the other things on our plate or the SG&A cost or whatever we're doing right now, we have to be a bit cautious. “The economy’s a bit funny. We’re letting people go. We have to be a bit careful about making major capital investments in things, at least for a quarter or two.” You go, “I got it. That seems reasonable to me and logical.” Making sure it's an ongoing discourse. I love the idea of the proactive approach.
That requires managers to be better communicators on the why. That's all we want. I don't want just a flat-out no. You walk away from me and I'm like, “Is this something I did? Are you not interested in me? Is it a budget? Is it too many projects? Are you having a bad day? Just tell me why.” We may not like the answer, but at least now we're not wondering what it is.
This requires managers to hone their communication skills. They're dealing with conflict. Kim Scott’s Radical Candor is a great book on how to give constructive criticism and constructive advice, as well as guide and coach in a way that may be uncomfortable to the person giving it and the person receiving it, but it is necessary.
This goes into that employee experience. I give a suggestion that it goes into a black hole. Let's call it employee surveys. If you're surveying your employees and they care enough to answer the survey, we found in the research that the majority of companies capture employee data and don't know what to do with it. They don't know what to do with it so they do nothing with it. The next time the company surveys the employees, what's the employee going to do? They didn't do anything the last time. Why am I going to answer this time? Those little things go a long way and play a part. That's a culture comment. We survey and do nothing with it as a culture problem.
If you're surveying your employees and they care enough to answer the survey, and you do nothing with it, that is a culture problem.
We survey, we understand and uncover where the problems are, and then we don't ever say what we're doing or we don't ever give readouts of what we've done, what's working, what was adjusted, or to your point, where we started this whole conversation. In highly regulated industries, you have very different sets of rules than industries that are not regulated. As an employee, you may not know the regulations, so you think what you're doing is stupid. Unfortunately, it's necessary.
If I go, “Ah,” it's because I work in telco or financial services, that's why it is the way that it is. If you're flat-out frustrated, don't work in highly regulated industries. Go sell somewhere else. I think that the feedback loop was one of the findings in the study that has an impact on the satisfaction and dissatisfaction of employees.
That’s an amazing place to stop. First of all, Tiffani, we could keep talking about this for hours. I'm sure you're talking about this for hours every day with other podcasts and interviewers. On behalf of our team and everybody in the show, thank you so much for joining us today. We exist with the show because we're about trying to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales and in doing so, we improve the lives of professional salespeople.
The Experience Mindset talks about making sure organizations and leaders balance that flywheel between customer experience and employee experience moves in that direction. The leaders tuning in to this are going to glean a lot. I think that the salespeople tuning in are going to have hope that doing this is smart for business and drives better results.
We talked about the CAGR at 1.8 times better over a three-year period of time. We'll have all the links, Tiffani, but how do people learn more about you? Team, there is going to be learning more about Tiffani after you go and get The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth by Tiffani Bova. How else do they follow what you are doing outside of the book and the What's Next podcast?
Those two are great. Of course, I appreciate anybody deciding to go pick up the book. That would be amazing. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I’ve got no more connections, so you only can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active. I'm also active on Twitter and Instagram. I’m starting to get more active on Threads. I am also interested in feedback.
If there’s something that resonated with you today, or more importantly, you did not agree with, drop me a direct message on LinkedIn. Those are great because you'll be like, “I heard what you said. I tried it, but it didn't work. This is what happened,” because I learn from you. As I speak and give examples, I get new examples from you, but I also course correct. Things are changing. I wrote this book over a year ago and it doesn't mean things haven't changed. Ultimately, I'm always trying to keep it fresh and I get that from you. Any feedback, I'm always open.
We always close the show with a similar comment, Tiffani. Folks, thank you for tuning in. We thank Tiffani Bova again. Folks, you know why we run this show and we want to get better. We'd love to know if there are things we can do to improve the value you get from this discussion. My personal email that I check is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism and we respond to every email and all the feedback we get. First of all, thank you for sending your notes and please keep them coming and we'll see everybody next time. Tiffani, thank you so much. We'll see you again soon.
Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Mark, for having me back. I appreciate the support.
You're welcome.
Important Links
Roger Martin – Past Episode
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About Tiffani Bova
Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue-producing divisions at businesses ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500. As a Research Fellow at Gartner, her cutting-edge insights helped Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, and other prominent companies expand their market share and grow their revenues. She has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50 twice. She is also the host of the podcast What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova.