Tiffani Bova

Summary

Episode Summary: The Look Back with Tiffani Bova

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Look Back: Keith Newman interviews top Entrepreneurs and Influencers on "Their Startup Journey"
• Host: Keith Newman, former journalist and startup/go-to-market executive
• Guest: Tiffani Bova
• Release Date: April 25, 2024

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Introduction

In this enlightening episode of The Look Back, host Keith Newman welcomes returning guest Tiffani Bova for an in-depth discussion about her latest book, The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth. Tiffani, a seasoned expert with three decades in the tech industry, shares her insights on the evolving landscape of growth strategies, the critical balance between customer and employee experiences, and the transformative impact of technology, including AI.

The Evolution of Growth Mindset

Tiffani begins by reflecting on her extensive journey in the tech sector, highlighting her early involvement with cloud technology:

“I sold my very first domain name in 1997. I was a Loquas beta client. I was Constant Contacts beta client. You know, I was having virtual sellers sell via chat in 2001” (02:48).

She emphasizes how the concept of growth has shifted from traditional methods to a more nuanced approach driven by both technology and market demands. Tiffani notes that while the number of marketing technologies has exploded—from a handful in the early 2000s to over 18,000 tracked today—this proliferation has inadvertently increased complexity for employees:

“Brands have been spending billions... to decrease the effort of a customer... Unfortunately, the unintended consequence has been... we've lifted and shifted... effort over to employees” (05:30).

Balancing Customer and Employee Experience

A central theme of the conversation is the imbalance between optimizing customer experience and employee experience. Tiffani argues that while companies have excelled at making interactions seamless for customers, they have neglected the employee side, leading to increased frustration and decreased productivity:

“On the customer side, it's one click. On the employee side, it's five applications” (06:22).

She highlights statistics from MuleSoft, revealing that enterprises use an average of 1,062 unique applications, with only about 27-28% integrated. This fragmentation not only hampers employee efficiency but also indirectly affects customer satisfaction.

The Role of Metrics and Executive Priorities

Tiffani delves into how executives often prioritize metrics that directly impact their compensation, typically focusing on customer-oriented KPIs like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) while neglecting employee-centric metrics such as Employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) or employee satisfaction. This misalignment perpetuates a cycle where employee dissatisfaction undermines customer experience initiatives.

“Your compensation doesn't say. Kind of looked at me like, damn, that was an easy question” (16:10).

She emphasizes the need for companies to align their metrics, suggesting that for every customer KPI, there should be a corresponding employee KPI. This alignment ensures that improving employee experience directly contributes to enhancing customer experience.

Implementing the Experience Mindset

Tiffani introduces the concept of the "Experience Mindset," which posits that the fastest way to achieve customer loyalty is by ensuring employees love their jobs. She shares insights from her two-year research collaboration with the Edelman Group and Forbes Insight, underscoring that the employee experience directly correlates with customer satisfaction and overall business growth.

“The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job” (14:58).

She provides actionable strategies, such as mapping employee journeys alongside customer journeys and establishing employee advisory boards similar to customer advisory boards. This holistic approach ensures that employee needs are met, thereby enhancing their ability to serve customers effectively.

Partner Experience in Channel Ecosystems

Expanding the discussion to channel and partner ecosystems, Tiffani discusses the importance of extending the Experience Mindset to partners. She argues that partners play a crucial role in delivering customer experiences and that their satisfaction is vital for mutual growth.

“The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get your partners to love your brand too” (21:22).

Tiffani advises channel managers to not only conduct customer satisfaction surveys but also to assess partner satisfaction, ensuring that the entire supply chain is aligned towards delivering exceptional experiences.

The Impact of AI on Growth

Addressing the transformative role of AI, Tiffani acknowledges both its potential and the challenges it presents. She underscores that while AI can drive efficiency and innovation, its effectiveness is contingent on the quality of data:

“The Achilles heel of AI is good data” (26:33).

She cautions that without clean, integrated data, AI initiatives may falter, and companies must overcome internal inertia to fully leverage AI's benefits. Tiffani likens data to oil needing a refinery, emphasizing that insights, not just AI, are crucial for meaningful growth.

Practical Steps for Companies

Tiffani offers a practical framework for companies to implement the Experience Mindset:

1. Conduct an Internal Inventory: Assess processes, organizational structures, and technology. Identify redundancies and inefficiencies that hinder employee productivity.

2. Map Employee Journeys: Align employee tasks with customer journeys to ensure that improvements in customer experience do not come at the expense of employee satisfaction.

3. Establish Employee Advisory Boards: Just as companies seek customer feedback, obtaining insights from employees can highlight areas for improvement and foster a more engaged workforce.

4. Align Metrics: Ensure that for every customer-facing KPI, there is a corresponding employee-focused KPI to maintain balance.

5. Focus on Data Quality: Invest in data integration and cleanliness to maximize the benefits of AI and other technologies.

“If you have good data, you use AI and it tells you, here's five insights. I'm not saying it's 100% right all the time” (26:33).

Conclusion

In wrapping up the conversation, Keith and Tiffani reinforce the importance of adopting the Experience Mindset for sustainable growth. Tiffani encourages leaders to prioritize employee experiences as a pathway to enhancing customer satisfaction and driving business success. Her insights provide a valuable roadmap for companies aiming to navigate the complexities of modern growth strategies.

“Nobody owns it. Everybody has to change their mindset” (33:22).

Keith invites listeners to explore Tiffani's book and apply its principles to foster happier employees and more loyal customers, ultimately achieving a balanced and effective growth engine.

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Key Takeaways:

• Experience Mindset: Prioritizing employee satisfaction is essential for enhancing customer experience and driving growth.
• Balanced Metrics: Aligning employee and customer KPIs ensures that both sides are optimized for mutual benefit.
• Technology Integration: Effective use of AI and other technologies requires high-quality, integrated data.
• Channel Partner Focus: Extending the Experience Mindset to partners strengthens the entire supply chain and fosters collective growth.

Notable Quotes:

• “The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job.” (14:58)
• “Nobody owns it. Everybody has to change their mindset.” (33:22)
• “The Achilles heel of AI is good data.” (26:33)

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For More Information: To delve deeper into the concepts discussed, listeners are encouraged to read Tiffani Bova's The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth. Explore additional episodes of The Look Back and join Keith Newman in conversations with other influential entrepreneurs and innovators.

Transcript

[Keith Newman]

Oh, hey. Welcome to the Look Back. With me, your host, Keith Newman, former journalist and media guy and go to market consultant in the Valley for the past few decades. Here we have candid conversations with newsmakers and rule breakers, the innovators, entrepreneurs and influencers who share their past contributions along with current insights in a casual yet candid content conversation. This lightly edited passion project of mine is a pay it forward contribution to the next wave of innovators and entrepreneurs. I sure hope you enjoy the program and feel free to share it with anyone who might enjoy it. Now onto the show. And now I'm here to introduce to you a new series, kind of a spin out of the Look Back called the Look Forward. And we're really excited to share with you something that's recommended from my audience. They said they want to hear about things people are experiencing today, what the new reality of the market is today. So with that, I bring you the Look Forward. Well, folks, welcome to the Look Back. I am so, so pleased to introduce my first Encore guest. That's right. I've asked Tiffany Bova to come back on the show. I just really enjoy the conversations we've had in between, you know, today and our, our last podcast a couple years ago when she was working at Salesforce. She has since left Salesforce and her Gartner days behind her and just came out with a new book that I captured here called the Experience mindset changing the way you think about growth. And Tiffany, welcome back.

[Tiffany Bova]

Thanks for having me. I feel honored to be a reboot.

[Keith Newman]

I don't want to say real Encore. Encore. You are fantastic. And I, I mentioned to you offline how much I'm really enjoying the book. It really delves into some really cool themes. Listen, everyone's talking about growth, but there is a bit of a, a view on it that says, are things really the same or do we have to take a new view of, of, of growth? Because we've worked in this traditional way and even through this cloud period and SAS period that you were so familiar with in your Gartner Salesforce days, it feels like there's a bit of a new age emerging, evolving that's somewhat driven by tech, but somewhat driven just by the needs of the marketplace. So give us, give it, give me your thoughts on, you know, on where you wanted to take the book and your thoughts currently in that. In that vein.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah, listen, this has been a long journey for me. I've been in tech now for 30 years. Crazy. It's been a long journey and I was super, super super early in this thing we called the cloud. You know, I sold my very first domain name in 1997. I was a Loquas beta client. I was Constant Contacts beta client. You know, I was having virtual sellers sell via chat in 2001 and two, like, so I feel like, yes, what's old is new again. What's very different, though now is just sort of the access and full core press there is against the usage of technology. You know, back then, you know, there was probably five or six marketing technology solutions that weren't kind of individual user versions of act and Goldmine. I mean, Salesforce was a year old. You know, it's SAP, Oracle. You know, it was, it was Siebel. It was very different technologies. But what happened over, like, that sort of decade was people started saying, oh, this is a new way to do business. Kind of get into the 2010s, if you will. I was part of the team at Gartner that made the prediction that the chief Marketing officer would spend more on technology than the chief Information officer. We actually made that prediction in 2008, and everyone thought we were crazy. But it wasn't about the technology. It was about this concept of we believed in the digital world experience was going to be that differentiator. It may not be products and services that were being sold, but how they were being sold. You know, like As I mentioned 2000, 2001, we were having conversations with a web design firm called Razorfish, which was one of the very early. And it was, how do you go from 10 clicks to 3 clicks? Which was this golden number, right, of making it super easy for customers to buy from you online. Now we're at like one click, no click, say it into your, you know, watch, a drone's going to deliver it to you. It's within two hours. And so brands have been spending billions and billions of dollars collectively over the last 20 years to do two things. One, decrease the effort of a customer and what they have to do in order to conduct business with you. By decreasing effort, you increase their experience. Sort of going back to what we were just talking about. But unfortunately, the unintended consequence of that focus has been we've lifted and shifted. And I'm using that very specifically because many people going from on prem to off prem is, you know, lift and shift. Well, we've lifted and shifted that effort over to employees. So while it may be one click for a customer, it's five applications for an employee. Right. While it's two steps for a customer, it's three Manual steps, four digital steps for an employee. And so that disconnect has increased effort for employee and decreased their experience. So it got off balance, Right. We've over pivoted to making sure customers have everything they need and we've left the employee behind. And the pandemic was a perfect example of shining the light on that lack of employee investment. Quiet, quitting, great resignation, all that stuff. And so it was really the foundation for the book, the experience mindset.

[Keith Newman]

Yeah. One of the connecting points in that, and I only read, like I said, have to have gotten through half so far, is the idea that with these individuals, we've asked them to do a task, but we've also put them in a silo and we've not given them access to the tools and the resources and the management to help them complete their tasks with the greater. With an understanding of the greater context.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah, but I mean, you know, like, let's go back to what we were just saying. You know, if I'm standing on a stage in front of a room full of people, right, and it could be employees of one company or employees of multiple companies, depending on what kind of event it is. I'll ask how many of you in the room can do your job in one application, your job in one app. Nobody's hands go up. Then I go, okay, under five. Then I'll say five to ten. More than ten, Right. Majority of the room is more than ten. We would never say to a customer, okay, open one tab on your browser, right? In order, you know, or on your mobile phone or whatever, but on your browser, right, to find the product and then another tab to choose which product you want to buy. Then another tab to enter your credit card information, then another tab to enter your shipping information, and then another tab to confirm the order. We would never ask a customer to go to five tabs to place an order, yet we ask our employees to have to go to five tabs to receive that order. Right? One to get in, then one into the billing system, then maybe one into logistics and shipping and distribution. Then one may be. And then the customer, it's late. And so the customer comes in and maybe goes via chat, but doesn't have access, so they call. Now the employee is on a customer service line. And you know, one, one client I used to work with literally said it took 22 minutes to do a return. Like the customers, like it's a horrible experience, but the reason it's a bad experience is because the employees in five different applications, to your point, doesn't have access to data. You know, there's silos in systems and tools and, and information. And it manifests itself in a horrible employee experience. Right. I wake up and go, God, today's a great day. I get to do three returns an hour, 24 returns in a day. Woohoo. I'm so excited. Right? I mean, that's not what happens. So if the employee is not happy, how do you expect then the customer to have a good experience when the goal in the beginning was improve the customer experience?

[Keith Newman]

So the back end has to get a lot cleaner, a lot more efficient, streamlined app access to different apps and things like that?

[Tiffany Bova]

Well, look, I was, I was sort of saying, you know, back in the early 2000s, there might have been five martech products. Today, I think Scott Brinkner's over 18,000 that he tracks in that Martech stack. So in, in, you know, 24 years, you know, it's, it's almost a thousand a year of new marketing, Martech technologies and sales and marketing and service. And who is, who is having to navigate all those tools? The employees? Definitely not the customer. Right, because you'd never do that to a customer because you'd never keep your job for very long. But to an employee, an enterprise has an average of. This is a MuleSoft stat. 1062 unique applications. Okay? Now that's across the whole enterprise. So it might be one that one person uses. Legal and HR may never be shared, but you kind of get the point, right? 1062, only like 27 or 28% of those applications are integrated. So if they're not integrated, that's a.

[Keith Newman]

Lot of, that's a lot of stress on the back end.

[Tiffany Bova]

That's a lot of stress on the employee. And more importantly, like, research shows that the switching cost in a human at a, at a neurological level on the brain is like 2/1000 of a millisecond. Right? You go from one tab to another, even though your eyes see you've changed tabs. It takes a, you know, a beat or two for your brain to sort of catch up over the course of a week. It wastes four hours of time. So many organizations are like, we need our people to be more productive. We need them to write. But it's like, well, I would be more productive if I didn't have to navigate nine tools to do a return.

[Keith Newman]

Yeah, I've lived some of that. I can relate. So where do you, where do you go in terms of turning this conversation into a discussion of what's efficient now? In terms of Building growth engines.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah, so. So the experience mindset was really a deep dive into this statement. The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job. Now, I'm not the first to say it, obviously, Richard Branson said it, Herb Kelleher has said it. Like lots of executives have said, if you have happy employees, you get happy customers. You get those two things right. You get the flywheel of growth and shareholder value and profit. And all those things, all true, but no one had actually proved, was able to prove causation between the connection points of that employee experience and customer experience. And so that's really what the work was. Two years of research with the Edelman Group and Forbes Insight along along with Salesforce. And so we kind of came up with. And very clearly, I want to make sure this is clear. It's not everything hr. It's at that moment that matters when an employee touches a customer. That's where I'm focused, not everything else. Right. And so it was. How can you, as leaders listening to this say, we're making a ton of decisions about customer. Pause for a second and just say with that decision, what's the implication to our employees? Okay, we're going to now do video chat for customer service. Great. That's what they said they wanted, right? We surveyed them. We did, you know, we did advisory boards. That's what they want. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to launch it Monday. How hard can it be? Everybody's desktop, you know, in the call center has a camera. Like, easy to do. But you didn't do anything on the employee side like train them on how to do video calls or how do you escalate a video call? Do they have the right technology? If they're working from home, do they have high speed Internet? You know, there's lots of things that go into it, but we're just going to launch this video call support because that's what our customers want. And we didn't think about what the employee wanted. So if you're making changes on the customer side, my recommendation and advice would be pause and understand what's the implication to employee. And the same thing, if you're doing changes on the employee side, like you're cutting hours. Okay, well, you're cutting hours because of cost. But now all of a sudden, the wait time is tripled for customers. So you looked at it from an employee lens, but you didn't look at it from the customer lens. So how could you Be more balanced in experience being the coin and one side being employee and one sign being customer, meaning experience, improvement, reduction of effort is the goal for both. Now it'll never be 50, 50.

[Keith Newman]

Now is this gonna.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah, but, but it will never be 50, 50. Right now it's so off balance.

[Keith Newman]

90, 10.

[Tiffany Bova]

Exactly. So if we could improve a little bit.

[Keith Newman]

Yeah. When you start to go into the mechanics of making that happen, what does that look like? Or how do you start to get.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah, great question. I sort of start with people by asking, what are their top three KPIs for customer?

[Keith Newman]

Yeah.

[Tiffany Bova]

What are they?

[Keith Newman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tiffany Bova]

So it could be csat, could be NPS scores. Right. Net promoter scores, could be customer effort scores. Depends how mature you are on that. But let's just pick those three. So if you're doing nps, are you also doing enps? If you're doing customer sat, are you doing employee satisfaction? If you're doing a customer effort, could you do employee effort? Right. Like, just start with the basics.

[Keith Newman]

Yeah.

[Tiffany Bova]

What you'll find is if you can go back in time, you may start to see this correlation of, wow, our employee satisfaction scores really dipped over these two quarters for whatever reason. Now all of a sudden you go, huh? Just with a lag of maybe a month, we saw our customer satisfaction scores and net promoter scores decline. Huh? Is that related? Right. And now you're starting to have a question most of the time, or you're having a better dialogue and conversation internally most of the time. Executives can rattle off the customer metrics very quickly.

[Keith Newman]

Right.

[Tiffany Bova]

Very rarely can they rattle off the people metrics unless they're in HR or unless they're high enough in the organization that their compensation is impacted by those scores where most of the time they might be impacted by an NPS score, but they're not impacted by an employee score. Right. So you. Very quickly, they could go, no, we are people. I was just having this conversation in Europe last week with a client, right. And they said, well, you know, we think we're pretty people centric, we have a really strong culture. And this person I was speaking to was the chief strategy officer for a multiple billion dollar company. I said, great. I go, is your compensation impacted by employee metrics or customer metrics? Like is it net promoter scores or is it, is it retention in your employee base? Right. Attrition scores? No, they're all sort of product oriented. I go, oh, so you're a product led company? No, no, no, no, no. We're a customer and people led company. I go, well, if that were true.

[Keith Newman]

Your compensation doesn't say that.

[Tiffany Bova]

Your compensation doesn't say. Kind of looked at me like, damn, that was an easy question. You know, he was expecting me to go, well, I need, you know, hire me to come in for the day. And I'm like, no, over our port. Let's just have a little conversation and I'll ask you one question. And right away, he saw that the behavior is guided towards where they're being measured and, and, and compensated.

[Keith Newman]

Right.

[Tiffany Bova]

The executives are a little different because they have a little broader, wider view.

[Keith Newman]

Yeah.

[Tiffany Bova]

But when priorities are being set, the priorities in a bias will always be set towards those. Those metrics.

[Keith Newman]

Interesting. Okay, well, I don't want to stay on this forever because there's so many other interesting things to touch with you, but this is a fascinating point. And I thought Salesforce, by the way, was a really, you know, great in terms of working with their employees and helping them build. So you obviously had some influence over there.

[Tiffany Bova]

Well, I'll tell you how the books happened was I was standing on stage in Canada and I said I didn't think it was a coincidence. Salesforce is a great place to work, pretty much globally, one of the most innovative companies in the world and the fastest growing enterprise software company. I didn't think that was a coincidence. So I went to our CMO at the time and I said, can I prove it? Could I prove that the culture being so strong allows us to be more innovative and resilient and be able to pivot 40,000, 45,000 people in the same direction very quickly, and that those two things happening in concert resulted in the fastest growing enterprise software company, so that's kind of where it started to just kind of answer you on.

[Keith Newman]

On that little context there.

[Tiffany Bova]

Sure, context. But what I'll tell you is even though Salesforce was a great place to work, you know, for 22 years, and it's pretty much its history and all of those things, it didn't have an employee experience team. It had a people success team, but it didn't have an employee experience team. And so through this work, they stood one up. But you can be a great place to work without an employee experience team. Right. But all of a sudden, when they started to break down the journey of an employee and deconstruct where there was opportunity for improvement, they found that there was work to be done. So, you know, even great places to work have work to be done. Even highly innovative companies have work to be done. Even companies growing have work to be done.

[Keith Newman]

What, what does it take for that to be put into motion?

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah, I, I, I often say start by replicating what you do for customers. So for example, do you have a customer journey map? Okay. For them buying? Right. Like here's the funnel.

[Keith Newman]

Yeah. Product roadmap.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah, here's but, but here's the customer journey and buying from us. Here's the funnel, here's what they do, here's their journey, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. I want you to, which many companies have that journey map, I want you to lay that journey map up on the wall and underneath it I want you to map what the employees have to do at each of those steps that the customer has to do something. So if you have a customer journey map, I want an employee employee journey map for the same thing. What does a customer do to buy? Find a product, place an order, track an order. Right. And I want you to map that for the employee. Just for an order, just for a return, just for a service call, just for right. Any of those touches. Start there. If you have a customer advisory board, I want you to have an employee advisory board. Like if you do things for your customers, the top three things, I want you to mirror that and replicate that for employees.

[Keith Newman]

That's a good plan. Tiffany, where, where you and I first connected back in the day, it was around channel and partner and partner ecosystems. And that's getting a lot of attention now. Not, not brand new, but it seems like it's getting its sort of its encore act a lot of ways. I don't know if it's brought upon by any, any specific event, but I think partner led growth is now matching product led growth as a go to market step. What are your, what are your thoughts? Do you have anything currently in, in terms of, of thinking around this?

[Tiffany Bova]

Well, what was great was this work sparked a team to say what's the partner experience play in this concept? I'm talking about? Oh yeah, if you're moving technology, right. Rarely is it exclusively direct. You may be a vendor that works through and with distribution. You may be a vendor that works through value added resellers or managed service providers or SIs or developers or consultants. Right. Whatever that ecosystem partner looks like. And so who owns the experience of the customer and then what is the experience of those employees, of the vendor themselves, of the distributor or partner that works with that vendor like the sales reps of those partner organizations. So there's a good play here, right? Because you could say the fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get your partners to love Your brand too, right?

[Keith Newman]

Yeah.

[Tiffany Bova]

Right. So you know, there, there, there is no way to decouple this concept from the supply chain. And I'm saying supply chain in air quotes because obviously you know, depends what that supply chain looks like. But those experiences are important. It isn't just about what's the MDF funds and the co op dollars and what's the rev share plan and you know, what's the opportunity and what's the training and technical certification or the sales certification is also like, you know, the we are easy to do business with is a flag in the sand that vendors have been saying to their partners for 30 years as long as I've been in the channel. Right. And so being easy to do business with has always been a goal, but it wasn't experience oriented. And so this is a great way to sort of layer that on. So if you're listening to this and you're a channel partner manager, a partner account manager, a Pam, a cam, a tam, whatever, you know, if you're a channel marketing manager, really thinking about not just going and doing CSAT surveys into your partner ecosystem because it usually tends to be the leader, but the actual individuals that are selling on your behalf, do they feel that it's a good experience for you? Because if they don't guess what they won't do. They won't pull you into deals, they won't refer you business, they won't go the extra mile, you won't get mind share. And that's the toughest thing in the channel is getting mindshare from especially the majority of the channel is smaller than $5 million. You know, there's a lot of little companies running around and they can't carry a lot of brands and they don't do a lot of deals. So vendors tend to focus on the 20% of partners that drive 80% of the revenue. And they put a lot of people on that experience, but the long tail deserves it as well. So I think partner experience is a way to weave this into the conversation.

[Keith Newman]

It sounds like another research project.

[Tiffany Bova]

Well, they did it. So they did it. And they're putting out a little ebook on the findings. Yeah. And really just taking my framework and saying how could we layer this on top of the channel if you will, in that supply chain environment?

[Keith Newman]

Yeah. I have to ask about AI because it's such a transformative scenario, at least from my perspective and great many others. But what is your take on AI from the standpoint of what does it change in this growth experience, in this growth go to market motion, is it new or what changes?

[Tiffany Bova]

So I think the biggest change for me is. Let me set a little context before I answer that question. Bain did a study, it was the opening quote for my first book, Growth iq. So it's dated a little bit, but I'd say it's probably fairly still true. But it was like, you know, 92, 93, 94% of companies are unable to grow consistently because of internal inertia, not external factors. Now remember, this was before the pandemic, right? So then you have the pandemic, which is a black swan event that really puts that external factor to play, which doesn't happen very often. Right. You might have had the financial crisis in 2008 and you could say, you know, 9, 11, you could say, say the pandemic, right, where there's some big event that has global impact. So minus that, this internal inertia will find itself butting its head up against AI because those companies that win, those salespeople that win, those brands that are able to grow, are going to use technology. And in brackets I'd say including but not limited to AI better than their competition. So is AI mining data and saying, okay, sales rep, instead of calling a hundred people, call these 10 that are more likely to do something with you. But I'm a 30 year veteran of selling. I just need a list. I'm not going to listen to AI because my gut. And this is how I've always done it, it's always worked for me. Yeah, that change in behavior will hold people back from the full potential of tech all up again, including AI, but not limited to AI. Predictive AI. Right. Data, all kinds of things, large learning models. There's. Right, there's lots of it. But the, the Achilles heel of AI is good data. And so many brands don't have it. They don't have data in one place, they don't have good data, they don't have clean data. So data may be the new oil, but the refinery is AI. Yeah, you can't just pull up to an oil rig and put in fresh oil out of the ground. It has to go through the refinery. And then the insights that power the business is really the petrol, the gasoline. That insight, it's not AI, it's the insight. So if you have good data, you use AI and it tells you, here's five insights. I'm not saying it's 100% right all the time.

[Keith Newman]

No, no, no, I get your point. Yeah, it's multivariate. The answer is partly. It's going to help me with data. Partly it's going to help me, direct me, partly it's going to help me simplify some things, grow some things, change some things. But I love your point about the inertia too, the internal challenges.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah. So I, so, you know, I think that, that, that is, that is one of those things that, that we just have to consistently think about.

[Keith Newman]

Yeah, we will. So I know I'm taking a lot of time and you got a bunch of things cooking, but let's, let's break out a second in, in think about a little bit of a paradigm shift that you're so creative with exploring. When you look at the market today, you step back and you have a whiteboard session and you do your whatever. I don't want to use a typical marketing jargony kind of thing, but just look at the market. Where are you seeing the risks, the challenges, the opportunities for startups, for, you know, our partner companies, things like that?

[Tiffany Bova]

Yeah, I'd say this goes back to this, this goes especially channel companies. Especially channel, especially channel companies in tech. They sell innovation, they sell transformation, they sell disruptive solutions, and then they don't use them themselves.

[Keith Newman]

This, the shoemaker children.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yes. And so, you know, the first thing I'd say is do an internal inventor. If you're an established business, do an internal inventory of your processes, of your people, meaning organizational structure, and of your technology. If you just start there and do an inventory and say, do we really need five of this and seven of this and are these processes broken? And then go to your employees because they know what processes are broken, they know what tech is not working, they know where data is not and where it is. And so list out the, the, the workarounds all your humans are doing in order to get stuff done for their job and then start working on making it easier for them. That will go a long way to improve profitability without adding ahead, without spending any money. Right. You may be actually reducing. And when I say reducing, I don't mean people. I mean broken processes, un. Unused systems or tools, whatever it might be.

[Keith Newman]

The companies, the companies that you're talking to, how do they respond to that? Thought is they're starting to tell you, hey, Tiffany, we brought you in here. We want to talk about our growth plans for 2025. Here's what we're mapping out.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yep.

[Keith Newman]

And you say, well, wait a second, the road you're on is all muddy and slippery. Let's fix that. How do they respond?

[Tiffany Bova]

Sometimes this has a lot to do with a Lack of self awareness. They don't really know what's going on in the business because there's a lot of filtering going from an individual contributor to a C suite, Right. There's a lot of cleaning up and filtering and repositioning so that things look rosier than they are. Right. So I would say when someone shares with me their sort of growth strategy, I focus less on what they have on paper. Like, okay, you're going to know better than me because I don't know, right? I don't know. I'm going to look at that and say based on that, if you're going to execute on that, let's deconstruct how you get there. And I start asking questions and very quickly they realize either A, they don't know the answer, B, they may not have the right answer, or C, they haven't thought of it. Right. So sometimes they have and they have pieces and parts of it, but they're, they have blind spots in other areas. So, you know, it's really an opportunity to, to keep asking them. How do you think you're going to get there? You want a 20% growth year over year. What was your growth rate last year? Six. Okay, so you're going to triple your growth rate. I'm all here for it, right? I'm totally here for it. Like, let's go. But tell me how you're going to get, you know, 120% output from your people who are averaging 72% quota attainment. Like you're almost going to double their quota attainment. What are you changing? Are you doubling your marketing spend? Tripling? No, no, no, same marketing spend. As a matter of fact, we've reduced the marketing spend. Okay, so you've reduced marketing spend, but you want your sellers to sell 40% more. Okay. Do you have a new product? Well, no. Okay, well, you know, and you start, right, so, so some of it is, you know, a hard look in the mirror, obviously with, with a little bit more finesse than how kind of, you know, matter of factly, I'm stating it now, but you kind of have to lead them to. Let's make this digestible. And in this strategy now, if you're a startup, you're actually in a much better position because you have no bad habits, you have no things that you have to work through. You can kind of say, okay, what's the best way to design?

[Keith Newman]

Yeah, you don't know what you don't know, you don't know what you don't know.

[Tiffany Bova]

But you can make it more flexible where it's not hardened decisions where changing becomes more difficult. So, you know, that's just, that's just something. Something to consider.

[Keith Newman]

Well, it's a great place for us to end. And I'm only ending because we got so much going on, so we might have to bring you back again. But I think, see, I feel like starting again, talking to my startups out there. I feel like starting with not just getting more customers on board, but making sure we're delivering happiness through our employees.

[Tiffany Bova]

Yep. Yeah. And let me tell you something. This is what I heard. I did a. I did a global road show. It was all virtual. I probably did 50 to 60 round tables with a dozen execs, C suites, Fortune 500 companies or 50 companies, APAC companies. Right. Large, medium. Very few startups roles were CEO, CIO, CMO, Revenue Officer, Sales officer. Right. Those. We didn't have a whole lot of CFOs. But there were a couple question one, if it's so obvious, why isn't everyone doing it? Two, who owns it? Three, what's the ROI? So pretty consistently. And then within the book, I tried to answer those three questions like if it's so obvious, why isn't everyone doing it? Who owns it? That's why I called it experience mindset. Nobody owns it. Everybody has to change their mindset. And then what's the roi? You know, if I'm going to spend a dollar, am I going to what's. What's my CAC over here versus, you know, spending it on marketing dollars or adding ahead? Or is it spending it on employees? What's the return on that investment? And if you only use that, you will continue to default to customer and acquisition and sales and marketing and not the people who work for you.

[Keith Newman]

Interesting. Well, I, I think it's going to be fascinating. I hope it encourages my audience here to go pick up the experience mindset and take it out there for their spring or their summer read. Everyone's doing traveling. I hear there's a great travel boom going on. So good get out there and explore. But take some good reading with you folks. Tiffany's latest book has a lot of great ideas and it's only meant to help grow your companies. So Tiffany, thanks so much for.

[Tiffany Bova]

Thanks for having me back again for an encore. Yay.

[Keith Newman]

Thanks very much. Talk Soon. Thanks for listening to the look back. We do appreciate your support. Welcome any feedback and would love it if you would subscribe to this podcast and even consider sharing it with some of your friends for more information and other cool info. Check us [e-mail].