AMA Recap: Using Customer Intelligence to Drive Revenue

Kate Hopkins (Host)
Hey everybody, we are officially live. Thanks for tuning in today to talk about customer intelligence and driving revenue. So we’ve got three panelists, and I’ll let them each introduce themselves, starting with Ed.

Ed Powers
Hello, everybody good to be with you today. My name is Ed Powers. I’m a consultant working in customer success and customer experience. Been at that for about a dozen years. My specialty my superpower is in analytics, continuous improvement and applying neuroscience to the customer experience.

Anita Toth
Oh, I’m the baby of the group then in terms of experience. Hi, my name is Anita Toth. I’m the teacher and Crusher at ATI we are a customer retention research strategy and education firm and we work with b2b SaaS companies, primarily with customer success teams and my superpower I gotta follow Ed here superpower how long I’ve been at it. Okay. superpower is customer insights through qualitative research. And I’ve been at this 20 plus years, but specifically with b2b SaaS companies. We are coming up next week to our five year anniversary.

Mike Gospe
Hi, everybody. My name is Mike Gospe. I am a customer advisory board strategist and a professional facilitator. I’m also the co founder of kickstart Alliance. We’re a marketing leadership consulting team. We’ve been in business for 20 years, I’ve run advisory boards, help companies both design and facilitate advisory boards for the last 20 years, more than 250 of them, cross multiple industries. And I’m delighted to be with our group discussion today.

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. So we we picked this topic by popular demand, one of the biggest conversation pieces so far this year has been around customer success and retention, and how do you make sure that you are in lockstep with your customers? And we realized that we had a number of different experts who tackle this from different complementary angles. So we’re going to dig into a couple different pieces of customer intelligence in the next hour. If you have questions, feel free to click to, if you’re on the OneGuide website, you can click to move to stream yard to add your questions to the chat. And we’ll be monitoring that all the time. So the first one we had a lot of pre submitted questions around was around different ways that you can collect customer intelligence, and needed this was probably a good lap for you, as you have different. There’s tons of different qualitative ways that you can get feedback from your customers. Can you talk a little bit about those?

Anita Toth
Absolutely. So I know that this looks a little overwhelming. It’s actually just just four different ways of collecting data, you can see there’s active passive, formal and informal. So active is when the company is going out to seek the information. So These might be things like you see in that upper right quadrant, interviews, surveys, focus groups, customer advisory boards, the company’s really going out to seek the those customer insights. Passive, though, is where the information just comes in on its own. So things like social media comments, the company’s not going out seeking them, they they they’re just coming in passively. Those customer insights are just coming in passively to the company. Formal means that they’re standardized. So the company has has done something in terms of the types of questions they ask, you know how regularly the information is to be gathered, how its analyzed. So the formal means that there’s some kind of structure really, it helps for benchmarking over time. And then you have informal, so things like social media, comments, community comments, recorded chats, and calls, really, these have have no formatted at at all, they just sort of flow how they will. So what it is, is, by having these different types of customer insights, what you end up getting is a bigger picture or a more robust picture versus just relying, let’s say on the company just using active or passive, so they’re just going out collecting or they’re just passively observing or collecting the insights that are coming in. So really, what you want to do is, is have a mix of all of these and depending on where your company is that you’re either going to start out with a few very simple ones, and as your company matures in terms of the type of data that they’re gathering, then you’re going to want to expand into more of these

Customer Insights, data collection points, really, that’s what it is. And so you don’t have to do all of these at once. There are a few key ones that can really help you get off the ground quickly if you’re just starting out. But definitely once once you mature, you want to have as many of these as possible just to build out that that bigger picture.

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. And we had some specific questions about surveys. So survey best practices, how should you think about qualitative versus quantitative and surveys? How long should they be? How often should you send them? Give us some of your survey wisdom.

Anita Toth
Okay, I’m going to actually start with a bit of a reframe around surveys. And that is that surveys are a monologue activity, meaning the customer just gives you a response, you can’t respond back in the moment to get more depth or insight or context around the response they gave. So just bear that in mind that this surveys are just just one way. So you have to use other methods to try to get your customers responding to them. And closing the loop is one of the best ways to do this. Closing the loop is where you reach back out to customers. There. There are different ways that you can do this. But the whole idea is that you’re trying to get some sort of conversation, if you will, with your customers. We’ve all done this where we’ve sent in surveys, and it’s like a black hole, we have no idea. Did somebody look at them? Did it make a change. And so you kind of give up whenever you see the surveys come around next time because you got no response. But by closing the loop and showing how the surveys were used, what were interesting insights that were collected, but making it impactful or interesting for your customers, when you reach back out to them to say, Hey, this is what we heard in our surveys. This is what we’re thinking of doing a you know, we found 30% of you answered this way, this is what it can mean for you, then it becomes a bit more of like a dialogue. And because of that, that, you know, customers just don’t feel like they they sent their survey in and gotten nothing in return, you’ll actually see your survey response rates start to go up. And I have two colleagues of mine who very heavily use surveys, that can get up to 80% response rates. The real key is to realize it’s a monologue activity, but you’re trying to make it into a bit of a conversation. So closing the loop with your customers is the best way to do that. And you will see your survey response rates increase.

Kate Hopkins
So we did get some questions specifically about response rates. So what does closing the loop mean? So let’s say I sent out a quarterly survey that was on the longer side 10 Plus questions? Sure. What can I do, if the response rate is at the beginning, kind of unimpressive.

Anita Toth
So in the beginning, it’s going to be whatever your your baseline is. So closing the loop, I really suggest reaching out to your marketing team and in craft this in a way that is very customer focused. So you know, send it back out and say, Hey, we had a, you know, a great response. Thank you very much to those who responded, here are some of the things we found. And you can add quantitative data like, like I said, 30%, of of our customers responded to question number three in this way. The other thing you can add are verbatim quotes. And this is what we have found really has been helpful is when you get someone from your senior senior management or executive team to make either a very small video or even a comment about what they thought about the responses they got.

And that really then feels for the customer like what they are saying is actually reaching the top. And so being able to use that really just then makes the customer feel like their opinion is really valued and that it is making a difference. So if you can get that just has to be something short, again, work with your marketing team on how to structure this. So it can be an email, it can be videos, it can be you know, posting in your community forum, however, you best want to share these results. And I would suggest using, you know many different ways or many different channels so that you can reach those customers. And then through that, again, the customer feels like they’re making an impact and because they feel like they’re making an impact. They’re more likely then to respond to your next survey. And one last thing about closing the loop, if you do have that quarterly survey coming out, and there are like new questions or maybe a slightly different focus, tease that in the in the closed loop communication that you send out, kind of make customers a little bit excited about, like, I wonder what the results of that will be. So you can have fun with this. It doesn’t have to be all, you know, super serious. But really engage your your marketing team to help you craft this. And, and really, the goal is, again, to get this monologue activity into a bit of a dialogue so that customers really do feel like their opinions are valued.

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. One more survey related question. It’s been challenging to get NPS and feedback from decision makers as opposed to just users. How do you how do you any tips?

Anita Toth
That’s a- that’s a whole whole other one. I’m gonna suggest this actually, there’s Steve Bernstein. Look them up on LinkedIn. This is really Steve’s area of expertise. He’s got some really great posts around it. Steve is the one who can get the decision makers respond again, 80% response rate. So I’m going to direct you to Steve, maybe we can find his we can have some up in the comments. Because Steve has this nailed, nailed down. So that’s what that’s what I’m gonna suggest versus trying to cram it in, like 30 seconds.

Kate Hopkins
All right, we’ll include will include that in the recap notes. Awesome. And so as we think from qualitative into more quantitative, we had a lot of questions. These are probably for you at around what kind of data you put in health scores. Can you talk a little bit about what data is good? How many data points how not to overcomplicate it? What are the ingredients of a good health score?

Ed Powers
Yeah, happy to comment on that. And Anita, I love your little grid that you put up, because I think that’s beautiful. I’m going to steal that and use that if I’ll put your name on it. Because I think that’s really cool. And I liked how you have that identified in the quadrants. You know, what, what, what you talked about as these active and passive approaches to doing things, we do get a lot of data from our customers, and it tells us a lot about their behaviors. And what’s interesting is that what people say, and what they do can be two very different things. So as you were talking about Cade having different perspectives, and looking at the problem from different angles. So that’s where this comes in is how do we predict future behaviors from past behaviors? And that typically, is highly predictive of what will happen. So all of us are familiar with customer health scores? And what are the factors that we would include in there, this is kind of the the common, you know, the usual suspects, if you will, I would say, the choice of what factors to include really varies, it depends. It is not a good idea to just copy what someone else does. What you want to do is really understand from qualitative feedback needed I have worked together before and she was one of the neatest quotes I love is that the data tells you what it doesn’t tell you why. And part of her approach is to really get out the why. But if we understand why our customers are deciding what they’re deciding, why are they choosing to renew or to cancel? Why are they buying more? Why are they buying less? That gives us a lot of fascinating clues from that we can come up with some some hypotheses and then look upstream and say, well, they said this, they said they cited this as a problem or a challenge or a reason why they did not renew, where does that come into play? We look upstream in our process, we understand where’s that problem being introduced? Let’s get some data on that and understand, is this a factor or isn’t it? And sometimes it’s very surprising some things you think are factors are sometimes the things that you think are factors or not, then when we identify those and test those using some statistical methods, we can then build a model that is predictive, which gets us to our customer health score. So there’s a process here, not just simply copy what other people do. These are some suggestions. But there’s a process to go through and do this. Sit at the top of the list, you have usage data, which is obvious and easy. That becomes very quantitative really quickly. But we had questions submitted, like what if what if we’re not SAS or even if you are a SASS company, you’re getting lots of feedback that is not strictly number based at the beginning. How do you quantify things that you’re getting from interaction so customer sentiment stuff, customer goals, stuff, adoption stuff? How do you make data that may not be on the face of

quantitative something you can ingest in healthcare. Yeah, this is a great question. I love this one. At the end of the day customers are still going to exhibit behaviors. So I would still start with that. What did they do? What did they decide? What happened? Did they renew? Did they expand? What is that? And how do we understand that? And how do we measured that? And why would always start with that? Customers? Are everything positive flows from customers? And the more we understand that, the more that’s time and the mother lode, if you will, we really learn a lot about what’s going on. But then to reflect it back into your process, and what might be predictive of that. Now, in this case, if you don’t have a whole lot of usage, or non SAS, you’ve got, you know, maybe you deliver a service and you don’t have a huge set of data to work with. There’s some fascinating stuff that’s going on right now, in terms of customer intelligence, also on a neat as grid is just in how we’re interacting with customers and emails on Zoom calls on Slack messages on you name it, there’s a wealth of information in there who said what, what are the what are the relationships between the people that are saying it? How often are they saying it, there is a whole host, we were talking before this this show on? Chat GPT and GPT-4 and analyzing that there is a wealth of information at our fingertips, that new companies are coming to market with solutions for and if we can derive real sentiment from things that are aren’t even explicit are kind of in the language that people are using in their body language. And they’re even things like pupil dilation that tells us a lot about how do people think, what do they feel? What are those relationships? What’s really happening here, there’s a wealth of information just in our interactions that could be used to predict those outcomes.

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. I know that health scores, accuracy of the health score is really important. Otherwise, why are you doing it? And you explained this watermelon problem? Will you tell us a little bit about what the watermelon problem is? How do you make sure that your health score is actually predictive?

Ed Powers
Yeah, and this is I wish I came up with this, I heard this, several people were saying it on LinkedIn, watermelon problem is it’s it’s green on the outside and red on the inside. That’s what a watermelon problem is. And you think your customer has good health. And you have a bit of a big and unfortunate surprise when the time comes for them to decide. So how do we distill that information and know that we have a good signal here. And to your point, Kate, it’s it’s all about predictive accuracy. However, you’re doing that now, surprise, surprise, you can quantify that, you know, even if it’s completely subjective, you can look at what we thought they were going to do and look at what they actually did do. And you can quantify that. And the more sophisticated you get in the way that you calculate these health scores, whether they you know, on the one hand are completely subjective, to on the other hand, completely predictive and AI and machine learning generated, you can actually measure that. So the key here is that if you have really good a predictive system, then you’re you’re not wasting your time, you’re not spending your time on accounts that are in good health, you’re spending your time in the places that are really going to pay off those that can expand, you’re working on those those that are at risk, you’re working on those those that may not need your attention, don’t waste your time. So this is a very key system that helps you make sure that you’re optimally productive.

Kate Hopkins
How quickly can you tell if your if your health score is predictive?

Ed Powers
Well, there, nothing is perfect. The there’s a great quote from the wonderful, well known statistician, George Box, he said, all models are wrong, some are useful. And that’s how you need to look at it, that it’s always relative. So even though you have you know, you have some surprises here and there, it’s the frequency of the times that it’s wrong. That’s the important thing. And how do you measure that? How do you quantify that, and how do you improve it?

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. So then moving into sort of our next chunk of questions. We had some questions about CABs. But before we get into those, Mike, when is the CAB good versus other types of voice of customer research?

Mike Gospe
So you know what, this is a really great, great question. And it all comes down to you need to use the right tool for the right job. And there’s a lot of tools out there as we’re alluding to, and there’s a lot of confusion about what a customer advisory board is where it fits. And so I’ve put together this model to help distinguish of what I see as three levels of interaction in a voice The customer model and this, this will help. And then I’ll further describe in talking about this what a customer advisory board actually is versus what is not. Now this model does not imply judgment that any one tool is better than, than anything else. Ultimately, in the back of everybody’s mind they there are two key questions before you pick a tool to use that everybody needs to answer. The first is, what do you want to learn? And the second is, what are you prepared to do with the information that you collect? So with that in mind, let me describe this model. So on the y axis, I have tactical topics versus strategic topics, a tactical topic would be Kate, I had a bad experience with your product on Tuesday, what are you doing to fix it? A strategic topic would be, hey, we’re coming out of COVID. And workplace dynamics have shifted, we’ve got transformation coming out with this AI intelligence. What is that doing for workflows and how your company Mr. or Mrs. customer is going to be managing your workflow or your product line, or whatever it is the key line of businesses, that’s a strategic question. And you ask those questions to different people at different times. Now, starting at the base of the pyramid, the customer input model is purposely broad at the bottom, where I listed tactical and operational feedback to indicate that there are many people in your company customer success, sales, marketing, talking to many customers, on any given day, about real time stuff, and that is all goodness. And that’s where tools like social media, customer feedback forms tend to fit that’s your entire universe. specific tools play really well there. When you move up the stack. This is where some confusion enters. Now. It’s what I call product direction. So from a forward thinking perspective, the horizon I like to think about as you’re looking 12 to 18 months into the future, you have your product, it exists. But you want to fine tune a use case, you want to help current customers get the most value out of our current product, maybe you want to change the color of the user interface from green to blue, there’s some small, but perhaps important changes you want to make to the product. And that’s where traditional thought product groups would fit user groups online forums, you’re not going to be interacting with your entire universe of customers, there might be a couple of dozen that you might interact with, where customer advisory boards that now you’re dealing with a smaller set of customers, and ideally, it’s 12 customers per region. And there’s some magic into that number if people care to ask, but from looking into the future, you’re looking at 18 to 36 months out what you want to do with a customer advisory board is get qualitative insight into the problems your customers are trying to solve. Not today. But what’s over the horizon. What’s the next problem they’re gonna solve? How are they evolving their business, what’s important for them in delivering value to their customers. Because I have the same Whoever understands the customer best wins. And customer advisory boards are tools to look about how you ensure that you’re relevant into the future. So customer advisory board is best thought of as a strategy level focus group, it’s at the executive level, you’re talking about C suite or VP, people who are responsible for driving or evolving a customer’s business moving forward. And a company will host a customer advisory board. Usually it’s sponsored by the CEO or Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Product Officer, because you want to get ahead of the curve. And you’re talking about where the customers are going, and how your company can help them succeed. So it all comes down. As I mentioned earlier, it’s the right tool for the right job where companies get confused, is they think they take the words customer advisory boards, like Oh, I know what that is. But they confuse it with either a product focus group, a customer forum, or something else and those tools are valuable, but they have different objectives. So this is a little bit about how the pieces fit together. Awesome. We had a question from Zach if you have a diverse or not well understood ideal client profile. How do you develop that? Do you need to develop that before building a cab or you have multiple What do you do if you if you serve different so this is a good question. So it’s kind of a loaded question. So it cabs right right tool for the right job and cabs are not universal. There are some companies that are just not ready to run a cab. So if you are an early stage startup, and you don’t yet know who your ideal customer profile is, you might want to wait on doing a cab cab might not be your best foray into gathering this qualitative feedback.

On the other hand, if you are further down the road, and you do have a diverse set, let’s say you’re selling your company, your your product sells horizontally across various industries, some of the most powerful advisory board conversations are happening when you get people representing different industries, talking about how they’re solving the the AI problem, or digital transformation, or going into or out of COVID. That’s therapies session. Actually, it is. Oftentimes calves are indeed therapy sessions, because everybody thinks they’re the only one who has this problem. And they’re not, it’s all shared. And sometimes that learning can help you identify where the best customer sweet spot is, which can help you guide the focus of your your business. So you don’t need to have all the answers, but you need to have enough of a track record of who you believe your customer sweet spot is. So you can answer the two questions I started with, what do you want to learn? And what are you prepared to do with the information that you collect?

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. So another another follow up question. What are the types of questions you should ask a CAB? And how do you get that high level strategic information?

Mike Gospe
Yes, so the these this slide here is just a very high level overview of the type of categories of the discussion might be. But if I were to further simplify what what typically happens, there is a pattern to the first time you run an advisory board and the objectives of your initial cab conversation is to do two things. One is to understand the trends and drivers that are shaping your customers business decision making, into where they’re investing today for the future. And so understanding those trends and drivers is really important. The flip side of that is to test your value proposition to see how it matches to solve the problems associated with the trends and drivers and to gauge customer’s expectations of Oh, I understand you solve that problem. I have that problem. Okay, you’re good partner to work with. So if understanding trends and drivers and validating your value proposition, that’s kind of where you start. The questions that you would ask are not about your feature set, you don’t prioritize your features with a cab again, there’s better tools to do that. You’re testing business problems to see if you’re relevant for that. You’re you’re testing them against what is the criteria, regardless of vendor that they choose to solve this problem? What does that look like? What needs do they have, and so technology operate, options fall into it operational a lot of times, eventually, every single one of our businesses will become a commodity at some point in time. But the point of differentiation is not necessarily what you do, but how you do it. And there can be some differentiation, that differentiation may come up in operations, and how they view competitive alternatives, ultimately, and customer satisfaction. So the questions relate to what do you want to learn? What are you prepared to do with what you collect? One of the biggest challenges and, and disappointments companies have is when I hear executives say, oh, Mike, we ran a cab, we had a great conversation, and I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know. And I think what a tremendous waste of time. So this is just to get you started, I’ve written a cab Resource Center, you’ll find it at cabstrategy.com, where I’ve written a ton of articles and videos of variety of best practices that dig into this and a whole lot more in much more detail. And I offer that to people to check out at your leisure, cabstrategy.com.

Kate Hopkins
We’ll include that in the in the recap notes as well. So we’re moving into more open q&a. If you have questions, go ahead and click that Ask a Question button at the bottom and submit it. And in the meantime, we have we have more in the backlog. So this one is probably for Anita and or Mike, what are some best practices for asking for testimonials. So you’re trying to get feedback or positive feedback back from your customers?

Anita Toth
I guess Mike and I can both share this. I’ll just say there’s the best time that’s part of the best practice and that is usually after they’ve achieved a milestone or when it’s always easier to go when things are going well. Emotions are are high to reach out then and ask. The other thing that that we always recommend for our clients is well is to sort of let customers know that this may happen, you can do this during your your kickoff calls throughout onboarding, letting them know that, hey, we might reach out to you, versus just sort of it coming out of the blue, they’re not expecting it. So if you can sort of just gently seed the idea that you might be reaching out to them.Yeah, you might be surprised at the uptake you get.

Mike Gospe
Yeah, I completely agree. Asking for testimonials is one of the hardest things to do. Because it’s important to you, it’s not important to them. What I have found to be helpful. Now again, I use the advisory board as a as a springboard is find forms to get customers to talk to each other. And you just sit back and listen and take notes. And then you find some really good anecdotes for your your story to tell. You can’t be selfish, it can’t be on your agenda. Don’t ask, Oh, you signed a contract, I need a testimonial. That’s not really good, good form. But as Anita says, wait for a milestone, celebrate the success and get customers talking to each other. If you’re doing a user group form or something, have a birds of the feather session, have them talk to each other, just sit back and listen to a great quote, can I can I use this? That’s a little bit of a guerrilla tactic you can use for that.

Kate Hopkins
I like it. This next question is pretty broad. And I think it probably the answer varies depending upon whether we’re talking about feedback, health scores or caps. So quick popcorn. Starting out, we can we can start with a customer health score, who should own it? And what resources do you need to pull it off? Customer health score?

Ed Powers
Yeah, typically, this goes to your customer success operations team, sometimes your RevOps team, people who are working with data; I actually teach a course called data driven decision making for customer success, where people learn these basic statistical tools that you can use to construct data driven health scores. Most times they’re very subjective, even from the technology platform providers, but you want to be data driven on this and the people who are working with data every day, they really should should on this.

Kate Hopkins
And so if you don’t have CSR, let’s say you only have a handful of CSMs. Is it the Head of Customer Success? Is it like a generalist data analytics person? Who else can in a smaller company?

Ed Powers
Yeah, on a smaller, there’s probably someone who’s comfortable with numbers, there’s probably some analysts, some some bi person, anyone who is who’s comfortable taking on that role, and really understands the difference between, you know, data visualization and data analysis as a two very different things. And they are comfortable building predictive models. So that’s the person you want to be working with.

Kate Hopkins
Cool. All right, Anita, what about voice of the customer? Who owns it? Who what do you what do you need to pull it off?

Anita Toth
So I think we’re almost gonna get the same answer here. Same thing, customer success. However, with voice of the customer getting customer insights, you can start even as just a, a single individual. So a founder like it can start from day one, like Mike said, get a get a couple of your your I like the birds of a feather, have have a meeting, start collecting this, like, you should always be speaking with your customers, I think what ends up happening is as the company gets bigger, this this kind of tends to fall away, it becomes nobody’s responsibility. But yet everyone still can benefit from the insights that are that are gained. So if you can do it formally through customer success, that is great. But if you’re in product they’re collecting, you can collect from marketing, sales support, like there’s all different entry points into this, I think the biggest thing is to start adding in, you’d like Ed said, you’ve got a lot of quantitative data. Mike and I are here to say, hey, add in the qualitative, find out the why. So if you can get something formal, great start with customer success, if not just even, you know, a couple of customers getting together starting to analyze this data and getting just used to the practice of speaking to your customers directly.

Kate Hopkins
And then Mike, your I think your answer might be different. Who owns the CAB? Yeah, so this. So this is this is a good question. So CABs only work counts are top down driven. They need to be to be most successful. They can only work if the CEO and the leadership team are genuinely interested in listening to listening to customers. Now, I say this because there’s some very smart people, some some CEOs who are a friend of mine, who I would never recommend a customer advisory board to frankly be between just us friends here. their egos are just too damn big. They think that they know all the answers. And I’ve had a CEO say Mike, what can customers possibly tell me I know my industry better than, than they do. And they missed the whole point because customer needs and expectations frequently change at the drop of a dime. And they can change at any time, you need to be ahead of it. So who owns this, sometimes, if you’re a small company, if you’re a startup, it’s not unusual to have the CEO say, I care about customer feedback. And guys, it’s an initial initiative, and we’re gonna run it for, in fact, cabs are initiatives, they are not events, strip the word event out of your vocabulary, because if you say, Oh, we’re holding, hosting a customer advisory board event feels like a marketing gimmick, and nobody’s going to want to come to that. So who a CEO might sponsor it, but the owner, it’s oftentimes, the Chief Marketing Officer couldn’t be a chief strategy officer could be a chief product officer or customer support ops, it’s whoever on the leadership team has the wherewithal and the passion to lead this as a cross functional initiative, it must be somebody on the executive team to sponsored, they’re going to have a cab operations manager or director is going to run the logistics and the components behind it. And then there’ll be a small core team of people who will help make it happen. It is an internally run initiative, there are elements you cannot outsource, you should not outsource, because it’s a strategic asset. And so you need to have that connectedness with the team. And I always say you approach the cab with the same level of respect and interaction as you would for planning for a board of directors meeting. I mean, you wouldn’t just throw that together at the drop of a hat, you put some proper planning into it. And so you need some executive attention on this as well. So hopefully, that helps us some guidance.

Kate Hopkins

Awesome. This next was probably good for Anita, but feel free to chime in. How do you package and present the information you get back?

Anita Toth
Oh, this is a great question. Actually, I was taping a mini article on it today. Because if you go to, to our website, there’s actually a longer article plus a down a downloadable guide to go through the five steps. So the biggest thing is, humans make decisions by emotion first, then we always rationalize second. So if you’re wanting to get buy in from your executive team, you’ve got to tap in even a little bit to those emotions. Now. Every single person on that that team is going to respond a little bit differently. So I’ll I’ll same thing asked for the link. It’s it’s, I believe called getting buy in from your executive team at ati.ac. So you can look it up there, throw it in the chat. But really, you want to tailor the information, this is one of the key mistakes we see is that it’s kind of like a one size fits all, but your CFO is going to be emotionally moved by different things, and perhaps your your, your CEO, or your CTO who, whoever it is. And it’s really understanding the individuals and presenting the information so that it emotionally kind of pulls a little bit on all of them. So the other steps, you can go and look up. But if there’s anything anything I can say, that would be it. And the other thing is learn how to anchor your ask. So very simply, status quo, big number here it is your project, your ask whatever it is smaller, humans need to compare in order to make good decisions. So frame your ask in a way that your project is smaller. And the status quo, the impact the cost, everything is much bigger. So go check out that resource because it’s it’s all there with pro tips and a whole bunch of other things in there.

Mike Gospe
So one thing if I could to add to any this thing, and I’m not sure if this was the direction of where the customer the question was coming from, is, you know the saying that a profit is not recognized in His own hometown. So if you’re a marketer, and you’re doing data and you want to present a project or a concept to executive team, the execs might be inclined to not believe you to think that you don’t bring credibility. So you wait to get it. There’s nothing more powerful than inserting actual real customer quotes and having the data speak for itself. When running a customer advisory board, it’s not unusual to have a CEO say, You know what, I’m not sure I want to do this. I haven’t done this before. I don’t know what the value is. So a good first step is interview a few customers and ask them about the concept and when you use the customer’s own words that says, oh my god, I’m waiting for you, all my vendors to do customer advisory boards, that’s important because of XY and Z, you present that to him. That’s much more powerful than you as an individual trying to push the boulder uphill, to say, I know, it’s a great idea, but my execs don’t buy into it. You use Customer Quotes. The CEO says, That’s a great idea. And you know what, and then you say, boss, that’s an excellent idea.

Anita Toth
Mike, thank you, thank you for mentioning that. This is what we do. When we report back to our clients. I’ll add one other thing, versus just quotes. If you can get quotes and little video snippets of your customers like actually saying what their problem was, what their challenge was, what their win was, whatever it is that you’re you’re trying to tell the story about. And wow, usually, you don’t just insert one, here’s a little pro tip do like three in a row, because it really then tends to drive the point home, that this is more than one customer who’s experiencing it. But here’s several in different voices, virtually, you know, pretty much saying the same thing. And boy does that. Edie knows he’s he’s he has seen it in action as well, it really makes a strong impact to hear it in the customers wars. I’m so glad you brought that up, Mike.

Kate Hopkins

Awesome. We another question on the more technical side. Actually, let’s let’s start with let’s start with this one. So you start talking about regression and statistics. And that gets intimidating. How technical does the healthcare really need to be? What tools do you have to have? Are we talking advanced statistics packages? Or how do you get into this, which is kind of the next step for earlier stage questions to do a lighter weight elsewhere?

Ed Powers
Yeah, you can do it in Excel, I teach my course in that I mean, Excel is $8 a month, right, with the whole Microsoft package, they have a free plugin called the data analysis tool pack. And there actually is another option out there that’s free, that’s a plug into Excel. So you do not have to buy mini tab or SES or any of these other ones, until you’re good and ready for it. So to get started, yeah, spreadsheet, but use something that has some of these tools built in. Microsoft has over a billion users worldwide, they’re building their Power BI offering off of Excel. So it’s going to be around for a good long time. It’s cheap. People know how to use it, it is the default de facto standard for the finance community. So get used to Microsoft Excel.

Kate Hopkins
Okay, is there what do you do before you even have enough data to run a regression? Like, do you start with, like color coding? Or is there is there even a level zero?

Ed Powers
Yeah, there is. And I, you know, going back to this, the process to really understand to start with customers, you know, back to everything that that Mike and Anita are talking about is that’s the wellspring of information, go talk to them Go understand what’s going on. And even, you know, the simplest way of doing it, yes, you can do a subject of where does your gut say, Are we red, yellow, or green? But we don’t have precisely, you know, scientifically calibrated guts, they’re not going to work that well. Right? It’s it’s it is a place to start. Even doing something as simple as identifying a factor that the customer says is important to them. validating that factor in your process, showing that there’s a relationship between x and y. And using just one factor immediately. Even if it’s just what you know, to build that health score that gets you better than just using your gut, right? Just pick one well correlated factor, and that moves you in the right direction. And as you as you learn more and more than get more sophisticated in your approach.

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. Jumping around a little bit. We have a switching back over to a tab question. Who should you invite? Like, who is the person you said that this is pretty senior? How senior is senior doesn’t have to be CEOs?

Mike Gospe
No, so the answer is it depends, right? It comes out what do you want to learn? What are you prepared to do with the information? So there’s a five step methodology that goes with preparing a cab, and your invitation list is step three, not step one. And this is where companies get confused. So step one is what is what is your objective, right? What do you want to learn? What are the big questions you want to explore? How are you going to use that information to validate or challenge your business decisions in your investments? There is nothing worse than asking the right question to the wrong people. And this happens a lot because companies who haven’t done a camp before human nature does not you don’t want to throw a party and have nobody show up. That doesn’t feel good. So human nature is to do step three invitation list is step one, it’s like oh, who are my friendly customers. I know these are first line users. I’ll bring them in because as I know, they’re nice and they’ll behave and we’ll get them in. Well, you can’t ask them strategy questions they don’t have. Everybody’s got an opinion. But frankly, their opinions don’t matter. They’re not a high enough in the organization. So you have to match the question the invitation list to the questions you want. Now, typically, you’re looking at cams are aimed at senior executives, your your mileage may vary on this, but it’s typically a C suite person a VP. In some cases, it might be a senior director, and actually, you know, it just between all of us. Titles really don’t matter as much. What matters is responsibility, and the level of influence and ownership that the people have. So your industry, depending on where you are in your business growth project, maybe those answers are going to be a little bit different.

But who you should invite needs to be those people who can answer those questions. There’s a lot more behind that. But you know, don’t you do not use your cab, as an entitlement tool to help set sales would say I can win this deal. If I can have John beyond the customer advisory board, God, please don’t do that. That’s, that’s the wrong way to invite them. And there’s a lot more I’ve written on this, but just you match the invitation list to your objective. I will also say if so one of the following questions would be why would these customers want to come to your cab? Well, we’re talking about human nature, everything the three of us are talking about is about human behavior. And there are three reasons why executives come to your advisory board. And it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, they’re all the same, because it’s all human behavior. The first is they value getting together with their peers to talk about strategic issues they care about, there are actually very few opportunities for them to do that. And there’s a lot of reasons why we won’t go into that. But there’s always reason number one, that’s the biggest draw in said, hey, I want to get us a senior executive who I don’t yet have a relationship with but he’d be great for this conversation. Using the right language in the invite, you can get them. So that’s number one. Number two is that there has always been a trend. And it continues now, where companies are actually rethinking how many vendors they want to be working with on any particular thing. They got too many vendors, they want to work with partners, not transactional players. And so these senior people actually want to know,

your business value proposition, what problems you’re trying to solve? Where are you investing in the future, they want to know, so they can influence you. So you can help them better, help them be more successful better. And the third reason is esoteric, but if you miss it, your your CAP program falls apart. And I mentioned this earlier, because you genuinely sincerely want to listen, you’re curious, you want to ask good follow on questions. Because there’s nothing more powerful than an executive, a CEO or, or member of his staff, leaning forward to go. You know what, that’s really interesting. Tell me more about that. And when you those are the three most important words, from a marketers perspective, tell me more. And when they do your customers lean forward, and they’re going to tell you things that you’re, oh my god, they’re going to blow your, your socks off. So all of this goes into and answering the question, Who should you invite, and of course, how you should invite them. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of context. Do not be afraid to aim high to get senior decision makers. Kava is a perfect excuse to do that. And you’re not selling anything. Aim High, get comfortable with your discomfort, I guarantee you follow the best practices, it’s going to work and you’re going to be amazed at what you’ll learn.

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. So Nate is doing some synthesis. He says the theme that because of this discussion, I think across all three of you has been depth and quality or maybe more important than breadth and trends. Is that true? Or are there any times where you really do want to look at lots of data points from across your customer base? What are the exceptions to this rule, if there are any.

Anita Toth
Both Nate, both, you need to have both and I it’s one of the one of the things like even just talking surveys, surveys are easy. They’re broad, very shallow trends, cabs, customer, you know, customer interviews, focus groups, those kinds of things, your community forum, all of that, that’s deep. So you need both you want to sit say, you know, hey, we heard this particular customer insight and in our community forum. Now we want to see does this trend apply to all our customer segments or is it just a particular segment? So then you send out some surveys and you look at at the data and say, Does this trend hold true? across you know, our entire base, so you need both deep to get that those insights like, Mike just shared where, you know, the CEO goes, Wow, we had no idea about this or that’s really fascinating. And then you validate that, and see if it’s a trend across your entire customer base.

Mike Gospe
And that’s exactly right. So this goes back to this pyramid model I shared where the answer is not just one thing, you need to have the whole pyramid represented. And as Anita said, You need to have this cross pollenization had that that’s really hard. That’s a lot of moving parts. How do you do so you know, don’t analyze it, pick three things you want. We’re gonna do Net Promoter Score, we’re gonna have product focus group, we’ll have a cab, or we’re gonna have three surveys, and we’ll do a calculator there. Just pick three things and try to end up getting a 360 degree view, you pick what’s most important to you to do it, but it’s not just one thing.

Kate Hopkins
Awesome. I think it’s actually a perfect summary question to go out on. So if you will, we’ll make sure to follow up with the recording, plus the references that the panelists mentioned. We also have some office hours available. If you want to follow up with one of the panelists on that, on that one guide landing page where you’re watching this, you can indicate that you’d like to do office hours with one of our experts. And if your if your investor supports it, we will we’ll hook you up with a one on one. Awesome. Thank you all. Really, really appreciate your time. Thanks for great conversation.