Greg Kihlstrom: How Customer-Centric Experiences Drive Sales

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Today's episode is with Greg Kilstrom, who is a speaker, entrepreneur, and currently an advisor and consultant to some of the top companies in the world like Adidas, FedEx, Starbucks, MTV, and many others on marketing technology, customer experience, and digital transformation initiatives. He's also the author of 11 books. His most recent one called The House of the Customer was the basis for our conversation. Now, our main discussion revolved around how to take a customer-first approach that was employee-driven and why it's so critical in today's environment.

He uses the analogy of building a house and starting with the foundation of culture. We went on to talk about how the customer experience is actually the key to sales and marketing alignment and how to create an agile approach that encourages failure and learning from it. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. What's happening, make it happen, family? Big shout out to our partners today, Gong, Vidyard, and Chili Piper. Gong's data is more than valuable. It's cornerstone in any organization looking to collect the data that's going to tell them where they can improve and where they need to spend their time making changes. Vidyard makes it easy for people to use videos anywhere.

No matter whether you're sending videos in email or on social media, posting them somewhere, or sending them in a DM, Vidyard has got you covered. Our friends at Chili Piper are so much fun to be around. They make it easy for people to get on your calendar. And every sales rep has got to have this function locked in. It's one of the most important things we can do as a seller. How can I get you on my calendar easily? Chili Piper can make that happen for you. Be sure that you're checking out all these great tools. And now, let's pass it over to John to find out who's joining him today. See you soon, everybody. Greg, welcome to the podcast, my friend. Thanks for coming on board. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Looking forward to talking with you. Yeah, I was actually really intrigued. You know, first of all, your background was really interesting to me, and it had a lot of agile in it, my friend. You have some Six Sigma stuff, some agile certification and business agility and all these things. So, we're going to talk about your new book coming up, House of the Customer, right? But before we do that, could you give the audience a little bit of a background on where you're coming from? Because you have a lot of accolades that I don't want to go through myself, but I would love it if you could kind of give us a summary to set the stage here. Yeah, sure. I can give a bit of background. So, you know, originally, I'm a graphic designer, web designer, really back in the day started my career as a webmaster at a tech startup.

And, you know, so coming from a creative slash tech background, I really started, I started getting really interested in the intersection of marketing and technology. And, you know, I was doing some creative still along the way, but really started getting more and more interested in how marketing and technology work together. That also brought me to be really interested in the process of how marketing is done and, you know, how these things are made better, not just the end results, but how the work about the work is done and done better. And that's really what kind of led me to agile was, you know, in addition to, you know, my interests in marketing and technology, I started a marketing agency.

I ran that for about 14 years, sold it about five years ago. And I, so I got very interested in, we were a boutique firm. You know, I never planned to grow it to hundreds and hundreds of people or anything like that. And so it was more about how do we do the best possible work? How do we have the best possible processes? And so that got me into agile. And, you know, at first I didn't really even know what agile was, you know, back in the day, but, you know, learned about it, really embraced some of those, those, um, those ideas and principles and, uh, you know, brought that to my agency. And, um, since selling, you know, written a few books on various topics of applying agile to non-technical fields like marketing and branding and things like that.

And, you know, I work as a, as an independent consultant now, uh, to a lot of large brands that are having issues, really connecting strategy to the implementation of that strategy. Love it. Yeah. I think in, before you get into their customer piece of this, I'm kind of, I'm curious on your perspective on, you know, sales and marketing and the difference from your perspective right now, just because, and the reason I ask is, is I personally think that sales reps need to be many marketers right now, right? They, they actually have to be part of the marketing program where they are every touch that they make, right? Whether it's an email or call a tweet or retweet, whatever I look at as a positive impression, right?

And that, that builds the brand, if you will, of that individual and the business. And, but the lines are getting really blurry right now between sales and marketing, in my opinion. So where do you see the line of connection, uh, and differentiation between sales and marketing from your perspective? Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that, um, ties them both together is what we're, you know, what customer experience is really the thing that ties both sales and marketing together. And, and you bring up a great point is the definition to me of customer experience is every single touch point that a potential customer or a existing customer has with a brand. And so a sales person or a sales email or whatever that is, that is part of that customer experience, whether it's before, during, or after the sale.

Um, and I think the, the delineation between marketing and sales, I mean, you know, I think particularly at a B2B world, a lot of people tend to forget that we're all consumers when we go home at night or when we're off work or sometimes even during work, but that, that whole idea, the expectations that B2C marketing and advertising set are still there, even if you're at work and you're a B2B buyer or, or, or something like that. And so I think that's getting more and more, the, those lines are getting more and more blurred and the expectations are getting higher and higher. And they totally, and this is where, this is where I'm going with it, with, you know, you know, with all the stuff like chat GPT and these things coming out, right.

And the hyper personalization, I think about people, you know, I've, I've heard people talk about all emails dead as a medium at this point because of all this automation and everything else. But I, I've actually take a different view on it. I look at it as the reason that we hate spam, for instance, obviously, is because it's all irrelevant. Like nobody cares about half the stuff that hits our inbox. But when I look at something like Instagram, right, I actually, and now because I spend, you know, that's kind of the platform I spend the most time on just personally or whatever. I mean, Instagram knows me. And so every ad is like, oh shit. And like, I actually could use that. Like, that's pretty interesting.

So if we fast forward where something like a chat GPT can scour the internet and know us personally and know our business and know what's happening in the marketplace, and then all of a sudden send super highly relevant personalized emails to our inbox, do you see that there's a future where our inbox is actually filled with valuable stuff as opposed to total spam? And therefore, does it matter if it's a person or a technology that does it? So I guess to answer it in the reverse, I don't think it matters if it's a person or a, or automated technology that that does it. Um, I do think people appreciate things that are relevant to them. I mean, that's, I think that's just, uh, I don't, I don't need to cite a Gartner report or anything like that to say, if something is super relevant to me, I appreciate it more than, than spam.

So, you know, I think you're, I think you're onto something there. Um, yeah, I, you know, I, I just think that, um, I don't think spam is going to go away, but perhaps the same tools that, you know, every time there's a new technology and right now it's chat GPT and, you know, and things like that, there's always this fear and panic about, you know, the world is changing and, and it's all, it's always going to be for the worst, but you know, the, within days of chat GPT being a thing and, and being this, this fear mongering thing, some guy wrote a program to detect stuff written by chat GPT. So, you know, like to me, this means that, okay, yes, we'll, this, these tools can be used for ill or spam or whatever you want to call it.

But I had actually think the same types of technologies could be used to make our inboxes better to your, to your point and make our spam filters all the better because they actually know I catch stuff in my spam filter once in a while that I actually do want. It's very, very seldom, but you know, and, and the thing that I catch, I'm like, Oh my God, I wish I would have seen that a month ago because I really needed to see it. And so, you know, maybe, you know, maybe, maybe there's a happy medium where it, you know, it, it helps create better content and it also helps, you know, filter out some of the stuff that keeps getting through the, the usual filters. Yeah. I think that it's going to be interesting when the, when the bots turn on the bots, right?

So it's like, it's like you ever see, um, you know, what it was, it's a matrix, um, the newest one, right? Where they, they're telling the story of why Scion now, you know, why Scion is bad, but then the new version is good is because when the, when they started turning on each other and killing each other, like all the machines, right? I don't know if we're headed for that yet, but we're closed, but let's, let's talk to, let's talk about the customer. Um, you know, you, you, you wrote this book on the house of the customer and, and, and also combining it with a, an employee driven approach, right? So talk to me about this, this idea of, you know, the customer's always right versus the employees.

Cause a lot of times it's, it's kind of two different sides versus kind of working them together. Like you have here, some people are like, nope, the customer's always right. So no matter what, and they kind of treat their employees like shit, if the customer gets pissed or on the flip side, they over index on employees and you know, the customer, they kind of question the customer. So it looks like you're, you're trying to thread that line between the two, but could you explain kind of your approach to that? Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I mean, I wrote the book because over the last year or so I'd been working with several large organizations, you know, I work on as an advisor, usually part of teams that really go in and help to, to solve some tough challenges and organizations are going through transformations.

And, um, what I keep finding and what I've found throughout my career is, you know, a company will say, okay, well, we need to invest in this tactic or this platform and that's going to save the day. That's going to change everything. Everything will be great. And, and whatever. And, um, sure enough, it's the people and the processes that I'm not going to say it's their fault because it's not, but they get in the way because they're people don't generally love change. Then that's customers or employees and people have a hard time adapting to change. And so when, once you understand that and you build your methods of implementing change around that, then, um, you start to build things from an employee perspective and because those employees are the ones doing, doing the work.

They're the ones that have been doing one thing for five, 10 years. If they've even stayed at the company that long, they've been doing it one way. And then all of a sudden you're saying, well, you know, you've been doing it all wrong and now we need to start doing it this other way because of the customer, because of this, you know, the bottom line, whatever. And so involving, I mean, everything's got to start with leadership support, but involving employees in the actual creation of the new processes and getting their ideas. Cause again, they've been doing the work. They don't necessarily know what's the best thing coming out in 10 years because they've been kind of often heads down and doing their work, but they have a lot of insights that, you know, a consultant from the outside, isn't going to see, and, you know, isn't going to have insights in until they know.

And so getting more feedback from employees and making the customer experience part of the employee's job are, you know, in other words, if a customer, if customer experience is part of the motivation of that employee to do a good job, they're going to be rewarded when that customer has a better experience. And it's this virtual cycle of our virtuous cycle of, of continuous improvement there. And I think a lot of times people get that wrong to your point. They say, okay, let's just, let's make the customer happy. Or we've got a bunch of employees that are unhappy. Let's just do whatever we can. But really making this idea of this, this continuous cycle of, you know, leadership driven, um, employee created and, you know, customer supported, it's this, it's this virtuous cycle that when it's done well, it, you know, it, it breeds great results.

So do you think, you know, cause I'm watching it in, in our industry specifically in the tech space, right? There's, you know, or whatever, 15, 20 years ago, Salesforce came out with the predictable revenue model, right? Where it was segmentation of roles. And to me, it, it was great for us as companies because we could scale really fast from a sales organization. I remember, you know, 20 plus years ago when I started my first company, I was, I kept hiring full cycle sales reps and I was a player coach manager. And at my management was basically keep up and very few reps can do all aspects of sales, right? They, you know, prospect, meet, close, right? All that stuff. And so we actually started to create, you know, out of necessity for us, this was well before predictable revenue came out out of necessity for us.

I was like, wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense. And, and so it was, but it was us focus. I'm like, how can I scale? Cause I'm sick of hiring sales reps and they're fired, you know, hired and fired six of them. So screw it. We're going to hire somebody to just do cold calls that I'm going to meet. And then we're going to close. And I segmented it out in the specialty and it turned into a really beautiful engine. And then it was, you know, replicated at scale with Salesforce. I'm watching it fall apart right now in today's world, because it is about as least customer centric as you can possibly imagine, in my opinion, because the, you know, the typical approach is cold call, cold call, cold call from an SDR gets a bear, you know, barely has any value to add, asks a couple of banned questions, flips it over to an AE.

AE usually requalifies it. Customers already answered the same stupid questions. Then a technical, they bring a technical engineer in to solve that problem. The engineer usually asks the same questions. And now by the time the client is actually talking to somebody who knows what the hell they're talking about, they're usually pretty pissed off. So how does that happen? How does, how do we avoid that lens, if you will? Because I, I did it for us, but it was us. It wasn't for the customer. So what's the framework we can use to make sure we're not falling into that trap? Because I'm like I said, I'm watching it fall apart. And I genuinely think that this year, 2023 is the year that the no value interaction is the tolerance is going to be zero.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a good analogy is like you call up your bank and you have to keep giving your account number and, and tell them the problem four times each time you get transferred and stuff like that. Or cable or your, your Verizon, you know what I mean? Right. Yeah. But you're talking about, I mean, you know, B2B tech sales. I mean, this could be an 18 month, you know, procurement process and stuff like that. So a customer can get very frustrated over, over an extended period of time. And so, uh, you know, this is where, uh, a big part of this is, um, wise use of customer data and how data is shared, uh, within an organization. And, you know, in the, in the bank or the, the telecom example, same thing applies to them and they're investing tons of money in tying customer profiles and, and interactions together as well.

But, you know, on the, on the tech sales side, yeah. I mean, why does a salesperson have different information than, you know, the marketing team, than, than a, you know, a tech representative and all of that, why is stuff not standardized? So, you know, that, this is why millions, millions of dollars are being spent in things like customer data platforms and data lakes and, and all of these things to really unify that. So that I think a lot of customers are a lot more comfortable being self-service as well to a point. And I think with a highly technical sale, with a, you know, multimillion dollar transaction, you're not going to hit, you know, pay now on a credit card and, you know, and, and complete the transaction, but you can actually get pretty far down the process, even on a large sale that, that is those technically complex.

And I think a lot, again, this, this comes down to those B2C expectations of, I want to hit one click Amazon purchase for literally everything in my life. And, you know, again, you're not going to do that with a house or a car or, or stuff like that necessarily, but you're going to get pretty far. Um, I don't know. I bought a Tesla, man. I bought a Tesla and it was all online. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I, I, I remember I called up the sales rep because I was a little confused about something and I started asking some questions and I hear click, click, click, click. I go, hold on a second. I'm like, are you on the same website I'm on right now? And he's like, yeah. I'm like, can I, I'm like, I don't mean to be rude here, but what value do you bring to this equation?

He goes, not, and he was dead honest. He was like, not much. He's like, I'm just here, you know, to dance. I was like, Oh shit. Okay. So I bought like $120,000 car online. Yeah. So it's there. It's getting, it's getting that dollar figures going further and further up. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, I think, you know, to, to your point, then those things that were helpers in the past are now kind of becoming roadblocks. And, you know, if somebody does want them, if somebody does pick up the phone or wants to chat or something like that with someone, those people should be available, but they should also have access to what did this person do? What have they seen already? What have they asked for?

How far along are they in the process instead of it just being in, Oh, well that's the sales system or that's the marketing system. You know, we're, we're way beyond that. And to your point, I mean, 2023, if, if nothing else, it is going to come to a head. There's going to be a lot of frustrated customers and there's going to be a lot of brands that really pull ahead because they're able to take things a lot further, a lot more quickly. Yeah. I think that's the key right now. And so I saw an interesting stat by Gardner a little while just recently, actually, that said that, that, uh, they broke down millennials, Gen Z and boomers and they averaged them out. And they said on average, uh, 43% of people want a rep free experience.

They don't want to engage in this is B2B. Um, but the, the, the part that gave me hope was that of those 43%, uh, who didn't want, or who didn't want a rep involved, they had a 23% higher regret rate. So basically whatever they bought, they didn't like it 23% more because they didn't have a rep involved. And so I guess the, the question is, is like, how, how do we empower people now to meet the client where they are with the value that they need? And is that purely data and insights or is there, are there other things? Cause also I'm looking at this from a perspective of say, I don't have the budget for a, you know, a great platform to give me all my data and be super hyper-efficient. Like how do the, the, the companies that can invest in these platforms meet the client where they are with the value that they need at the time, because clients don't always know what they need and they do need somebody in some cases to ask that question to say, Hey, have you thought of this?

Those types of things, but not the bands, the medic, the dumb shit, you know, sales process questions that typically asked. Yeah. I mean, it's a good question. I mean, without, without technology, I would say it would be probably just better training. So, right. And empathy with the customer. And I mean, there's lower tech ways of doing this. I mean, any, any process that I go through with a customer involves mapping that customer journey and that doesn't take technology to do. It's certainly, it enables technology platforms to do great things when you do it well, but you could have a very, you can use post-its on a whiteboard or something like that, map the journey out. And you know, what it does is it gives you empathy with that customer at the different pain points or the different questions that they might have.

And so instead of the salesperson at every point asking them the same question, they're like, okay, well they came to us from this channel, or they're having this kind of question. They must be at this stage in the journey instead of this other one that precedes it. So therefore let me skip over that basic stuff. If they have questions, they can ask about it, but that's, I mean, that's real time, you know, in real life personalization. But you know, I think having that understanding of that customer journey, that helps again, whether you have a technology platform or not. I mean, the word I think that stood out to me there is the empathy, right. Jeff is, is having empathy for the buyer and how they go through that process, which is why I think all of us need to become buyers of our own solutions, right?

We need to kind of sit on the other side and feel what it's like to go through that process. I mean, that's, that's ultimately what design thinking is about, right? It's actually becoming, being a customer. Like if you really want to engage with company, like become a customer and see what that feels like, and then find the areas that you don't like, and then come with a solution to that. So let's talk, you know, going back to the customer first and employee driven, you know, in your book, you use a metaphor of a house and having a strong foundation for it. So let's build that house. What's the foundation for building a customer first organization while keeping employees on board and happy and driven as well.

Yeah. I mean, the, the foundation really is the culture of the organization. And you know, that is, it's reinforced by leaders, but it's lived out every day by the employees and, you know, culture, like values are one thing and values are very important for an organization. And they're something that shouldn't change and everyone should know what they are. But culture is how work actually happens at the organization. You know, it's what actually, you know, values are on the wall and everybody tried tries to recite them at the company meeting and then things like that. But culture is actually what happens when good or bad things happen. It's how work actually gets done. And so having a culture that is customer centric means it doesn't mean that it's all about the customers and never about the employees, but it does mean that everyone sees their role in terms of how do I make a better customer experience.

And so therefore, as I was saying earlier, I'm motivated by creating a better customer experience and I'm rewarded when there is a better customer experience. And by doing that, I have more purpose in my job, which is a huge thing. I mean, we saw that with the great resignation and you know, all of that stuff is like people leaving their jobs because they couldn't find a value in the job and wanted to do something different for better or worse. When they have purpose in their job, that purpose can be many things, but one of those purposes can be creating a better customer experience, which really helps everybody. So how do you, I guess, what are some of the things that say somebody is listening right now and saying, yep, I'm seeing it.

You know what I mean? My employees, I was affected by the great resignation. You know, I'm losing customers to my competitors, those types of things. So if, if you're a leader out there, what's the first step as you know, do you have to clean house and reset on everything? Or is there a gradual transition to this where there's that light bulb moment where you're like, man, I like, I say, say a leader out there said, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to become a customer, right? And they go through that process and they're like, holy shit, that was a nightmare. Um, how do they write that ship? Where, where would they start? Yeah. I mean, well, you know, you bring up a great client. I mean, there's, there's some really good examples of companies that put people in customer service positions.

I mean, Zappos, USAA, there's, there's several that your first couple of weeks on the job are being a customer service person. And sure enough, those companies have really good customer service, customer experience, you know? So surprise, surprise, why doesn't everyone do that? But, um, in lieu of, of change, that's, that's a big change, you know, that's an entire onboarding training process. So that's, that's a big change. I think it should be considered, but it's a big change, but you know, one relatively simple thing is to go through and have every, every manager rethink job descriptions in terms of the customer. What does, what does everyone in the company do that somehow relates to the customer?

And you know what, I'm sure you could find a role and you know, somebody out there listening is going to find some role out there that has no direct connection, but you know, there's, there's some, there's some obvious ones that I think are, are underappreciated. Like, you know, the software engineers out there that are writing software that cut and customers are going to use, you know, you think of them as they're in some dark room, writing code somewhere, never talked to a person or whenever. And yet they have such an impact on what those end customers do, because if they don't understand what they're trying, I mean, how many times have you used some kind of web application or software where you're like, they don't understand me and they must have never tried to do what I'm trying to do.

So, you know, all of a sudden, even just thinking of those roles that, again, that's not even that far a stretch, but you know, start thinking of those roles in terms of how do you rewrite that position in terms of them serving the customer and them being rewarded by happier customers, extrapolate that out throughout the organization. I mean, what is the accounting and like, what's it like to pay a bill late at your organization? You know, the accounting team, they have a direct impact on customer experience, whether they, you know, whether they like it or not, you know, all of, all of these areas of the company do. And so I think that's a, you know, it takes a little time, but I think that's an easy thing to be able to do and to start really rethinking, um, how that relationship.

So what are some goals that they can put in place? Like, is this an NPS thing? Is this like, how, how, how do you measure this outside of retention, obviously in, in, in cross sell, upsell, you know, that type of thing, which is the obvious piece, how, what are some nuanced things that you would measure to identify the fact that you're moving closer to a customer centric, uh, environment? Yeah. I mean, I do think, um, you know, I have, I have some qualms with the NPS score being used as the only metric out there as far as, you know, CX and stuff like that. But at the same time, I also believe in, you know, not making things too complex. And so, yes, I, I do think something like NPS or customer side status, CSAT, or, you know, things like that can be used to say, okay, well, when this is going up, we are all winning.

You know, it, as a simple, like barometer like that, I think it's an, an amazing tool that can be used and, and just say, not just, uh, not just the marketing team or the sales team or the customer service or technical support team, but everybody, because we all have a role in this. There's, there's, and, and to be able to measure NPS and, or other things in terms of a broad customer journey, not just one step. And that's the only, you know, that's the only place we measure. I mean, more, you know, sophisticated organizations are doing it more broadly and have more nuanced measurements generally, but again, a simplified way to say, yes, we are all doing well. We're doing well together. And then having the measurements to say, okay, well, when it dips, how do we diagnose what's happening?

That's also critical, but I think rallying everyone around some kind of score, some kind of, um, some kind of barometer of, of this, I think it's a great idea. What other goals I think, you know, would you put in place for an organization that you're consulting with to say, do you break it down by, you know, department and those types of things, or are you, or do you try to look at it for holistically as a group? So you can create that kind of team mentality towards that goal. I mean, obviously there's some goals for everything, but what's more important, I guess, is the individual's goal towards and how it leads to it or the group goal of how we're going to get there? Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, I, I think both are important. And do you think there needs to be a shared company goal with that? Everyone. So, so the challenge with that again is if there's a shared company goal, but there's some person sitting there saying, well, that's great, but my job has no impact on that score. Then there is no, you know, there's it, it fails. Right. So that, I think that's where, when we can align everyone with that big score, then we can get a lot more granular and actually, you know, I think again, that's where some of these like lagging indicators, like NPS and stuff that they aren't, um, they aren't always strong because we don't know like what caused a dip or a spike or something like that.

But again, that's where more granular measurements on a team basis or, you know, product feature, you know, however, however we want to break that down, depending on the company, I think that's where those kinds of things come into play. So, you know, to answer your question, kind of a non-answer, but it's, it's, it's definitely both. Yep. Gotcha. So is there a framework here? So we talked about the foundation, uh, of building this, what's the framework that you follow, um, to create this culture to, to kind of align everybody? Is there like some steps? Is there, you know, some, a process that you go through with your customers to make sure they're on the right path for this? Yeah. I mean, so I, I structured the book, you know, using the metaphor of the house and really, um, because what I, what I found is we start, unless we can tease things apart, um, it gets there, lots of things get conflated and it's really hard to, to say that it's hard to diagnose where challenge areas are or where sometimes even we're doing okay already and we don't need to focus as much effort.

And so the framework that I use of the house, you know, the foundation, as we said, is, is the culture, the roof over it is, is the processes and the systems that are used. And those could be, you know, those, those encompass a lot of things bookending those, uh, on either side, the walls, so to speak, or really the business, um, objectives and the business outcomes, because let's face it, as much as we value customers, the business has to stay afloat and, you know, it's got to have strategic goals to keep it ahead of the competition and relevant to customers and it's got to achieve those goals. So, um, you know, those are very important, but then in the heart of the house, so to speak are really three key things, which is we need to understand our customers.

We need to serve those customers with relevance content offers experiences. And then, um, we need to listen to what they do when we, you know, when we believe we understand them, when we serve them with those relevant things, we need to listen to them and then feed that back into the system of continuous improvement so that we're getting better at understanding, serving and listening all the time. And I, I feel that splitting it into those three areas separates it into three very key things that, again, sometimes get conflated and, um, this spans teams at it, you know, lots, lots of things like that. But, um, it's, I think it's important to, to look at in, in granular ways like that. What's up everybody.

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This is very, very important. Sales reps that invest in themselves are often found at the tops of their leaderboards. Join us today and get the help you need to become the seller that you deserve to be. That URL one more time is joinjbsales.com. Let's get back to the show with JB and our guests for this week. Are you a fan of customer advisory boards? And if so, how do you structure them to get the most out of them? Yeah, I do. You know, I haven't, I haven't set up a lot of them myself. I've inherited a few where I've, you know, I've been able to lean on them, you know, from time to time, but no, I, I, I think when they're structured well and when the customers are engaged and, you know, I, I think they can work very well.

I've, and again, I've, I've leaned on them in many cases to be able to get some, some key insights. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the recommendations I made to the clients that I work with is, you know, specifically from a messaging standpoint, right? A lot of us, you know, from a sales standpoint, we guess on messaging, like from my background is marketing. I understand it. There's a big difference between marketing messaging, sales ready messaging, and then actually messaging that the customer would respond to. And, and so usually what we do is we'll, we'll take, we'll bring in like, who are the personas that we want to go after, right? VPs of sales and SaaS, whatever. Let's go grab some customers.

Let's put them on a webinar like this or a Zoom link and just start asking them some questions. Like how the sales team going back to empathy, how the sales team, first of all, do some homework beforehand. So you're not asking stupid questions, like tell me what you do and tell me about, you know, that type of crap, or what keeps you up at night. But there's some context to those questions that then ask, Hey, you know, what's a day in the life look like? You know, what, you know, what kind of prospecting efforts do you respond to? You know, like what are your problems today compared to what they were six months ago? Oh, and by the way, forget our marketing language here for a second. If somebody asked you directly, what value we bring to you, what would you actually say?

And then using that information to then create messaging around what they said with a little context of their priorities and everything else. And then before we execute with it, with any type of cadence or anything like that, giving it back to the customer and saying, Hey, based on what you said, and based on what we know, this is, this is what, what do you think of this messaging? And having the customer say, yep, nope. You know, ah, you know, that stupid question or whatever. Great. Then execute with it. Cause to me that aligns sales, marketing, and CS and creates the customer empathy and like everything that you're talking about here and puts the reps in a position where they're not just reading from a spec sheet that Sally, she's in marketing and she likes to be creative, right?

Cause that's all they're going to do is regurgitate that crap. Yeah, no, definitely. And I think, you know, that, that just kind of highlights how important it is to have the right makeup on that customer advisory board, because you know, you, you need to, you want friendlies on there in a sense, but you don't want happy talkers that are just going to say, Oh yeah, it looks good. Great, great job. You know, you want people that are going to be tough on, and you know, I've, I've been fortunate to have, there's, you know, there's some that are just nice and they're, you know, they're, they're, they're happy to sit on the board or whatever sometimes, but those are not the valuable people. The valuable people are the ones that are going to actually criticize and say, no, I would never respond.

I would never open that email a million years. Why, you know, why would you send that out to anybody, you know, fire your marketing team or whatever, but, um, you know, it's, it's, I think it's tough to find those people that are really willing to go above and beyond. But when you do, I mean, you know, incredibly valuable. Yeah. How do you, how do you approach testing, right? Cause I know from a marketing standpoint, AV split testing is just ingrained in agile and everything else, right? You're constantly testing messaging and subject lines and everything else. How do you align that with sales so that sales can be part of the test and learn from the test as opposed to marketing? Cause I talk a lot about this from a, you know, sales rep standpoint, Hey, split test, everything you do.

Problem with that is as an individual contributor, it's kind of hard to get to a statistically relevant number for split testing, maybe split testing to actually have any type of relevance. So how do you combine sales and marketing to test stuff like messaging and what's working and what's not? Yeah. It's a good, that's a good question. Cause I do think, um, sales, you know, traditionally there's a, there's a bit of a, well, you know, I've got my style, you know, it's a, it can be a very personal thing. You know, sometimes when you get someone early enough in their career, they haven't been kind of shaped by experience and or trauma or whatever you want to call it. But, but, um, I think it, I gotta say this is, it's a tough one because yeah, it, it's like, well, my sales style is, and I, I've even used those words before.

Cause I've, I mean, I've had to do plenty of sales in my life that the agency and even as a consultant. So it's like, I've got my style, but am I testing my style? And why did, why do I know that that style works? I mean, just because, you know, anybody can win some, you know, a sale once in a while. Right. Um, I think I probably have more, more questions than answers to this one because yeah, it's, it's tough. I mean, getting, I think even with marketing, you know, to your point, Mark marketers, you know, they're, they're not averse to an AB test and stuff like that. I think what I've found tough sometimes though is, um, maybe it's a similar enough thing to the salespeople testing. The process is sometimes different than testing the copy of an email, you know, like that to me, that's, that's often found very easy to do, but trying a completely different way of doing things.

That's a bit, I don't know if scary is the right word, but that that's a bit out of, you know, uh, out of left field for some people, I would say. And so that might be what's going on with, with a lot of salespeople as well as it's a personal thing of like, okay, well, I've been successful in my career doing things this way. I'll, I'll be happy to change the subject line three different ways. But when it starts coming, you know, to changing big things, uh, you know, it's, I mean, there, there's a reason, and I talk about this in the book, the, how employees adapt to change is the same stages of people adapting to grief of, you know, loss of a loved one or things like that. It's like, there are, the change is hard, no matter whether it's personal change, work change, like it's a, you know, it's, it's, it's not easy for any of us.

Well, I think that's, that's why the, uh, you know, what I try to instill is, is that mentality though? Like nobody's right or wrong right now, but let's test it out. So good. Your approach, great. Like let's let, but let's, to your point, let's define it. So it's not a pure art form. Cause it's not, it never is. There is, there's structure, structural components to everything that everybody does. So let's define whatever that approach is. And then let's define an alternate approach and let's try to bunch your way and a bunch our way and see what works. And at the end, that's why like, you know, very simple, basic examples here with, with, you know, cold calling, for instance, right now, reps are like, why should I make cold calls?

Nobody's picking up the phone. Why leave voicemails? Like when was the last time anybody got a call back from a voicemail? Right? So I tell reps, I go, look, you're probably right, but let's test it. Look, let's, let's run a couple of cadences here. Let's run one. That's your email. And let us run the exact same one and put two calls in it. And we're going to run one for one week and one the next week. And then we're just going to look at the data. And it's not necessarily about, does the call get a connect and does it get a conversation? It's what is the overall cadence response like when we add calls versus just emails. And inevitably we always find that when you add calls, whether, you know, you even connect with somebody or not, that the overall conversion ratio of the cadence actually improves.

Because going back to what we had to start talking about earlier, it's a, it's a touch point. It's a marketing thing. It's a positive impression that might remind them to go look at that email and, you know, whatever it might be. And so that's what I think going, let's, you know, circle it all the way around with agile. That's what, if we don't have a structure in place to be able to test this stuff moving forward, we're stuck in our ways. I mean, I don't know about you, but like agile right now, I think becomes extraordinarily more important than it ever has been because things are moving so fast that if you're not testing what's working and what's not right now, you're going to get left behind faster than you ever before.

Yeah. And, you know, I also think the, another cultural part of this is, you know, not every experiment, um, has achieves the desired result. Right. So I'm not going to use the, the F word because failure, there is no failure if you do an experiment well and you learn from it. Right. So, and that, but I think that's, that's a huge cultural shift for a lot of organizations as well. And, and again, the ones that got over this and the ones where, you know, you can do an experiment, it can not achieve the desired result. And it's still, it's deemed as success because we don't have to waste our time or money or effort on that anymore because we did it and we tried it like that's as a leader, you should be ecstatic that your employees found that and saved you probably for the next decade, you know, millions of dollars or something like that.

And so, but I think, you know, salespeople are afraid of failing and marketers are a fail are afraid of failing for the, for those reasons. It's like, well, I had this idea, but it didn't work. That's no longer the point. And, you know, that the agile and agile principles, you know, we are continuously improving. We're continuously experimenting and really there is no such thing as failure if you learn. No, I couldn't, I tell my daughter that all the time, as long as you learn something from it, you know, and I think that's where we do need to shift the culture to, and this goes back to again, our conversation about, you know, customer first, but also employee driven, celebrating failure, as long as it's, again, as long as we learn something from it.

So as long as we, because, you know, again, basic example, I tell reps all the time, if you make 50 dials in a day and you get no meetings, that's a shitty day. But if you made 50 dials and you did 25 with this approach and 25 with this approach and you still get no meetings, to me, that's actually not a bad day because you just figured out two approaches that don't work tomorrow and you come in a couple of new ones, right? And so if you take this scientific mentality, you can actually stay motivated through all this mess, because if you're just doing the activity and not producing any results, that gets dry fast. And that's good. That gets demoralizing fast. But if you're doing all this activity and you're learning from it and you're, you're crossing off all these things that don't work, eventually you're going to start to hit some stuff that does.

Right. Right. So I guess what, you know, to kind of finish up our conversation on that, is there a way that you can, because I do think it's also culturally a challenge right now with, especially some of the younger generations and, you know, not getting feedback, you know, not, not liking feedback, you know, those types of things. So any suggestions on how to alleviate the burden of failure and, and reinforce the learning component of this so that people buy into it? Yeah. I mean, well, leaders have to make it okay. And, and some of that is by showing it as an example of a leader admitting, I mean, you know, I was on a, I did a talk the other day at a, at an organization and, you know, I was hearing the CEO was addressing the company right before I went on.

And it was so amazing to hear a CEO being humble about, you know what, we tried this. I take credit for it. It didn't work, but you know what, we're going to move on. And, you know, hearing that from your CEO, from your manager, from the VP of whatever, you know, that can be so life changing to someone who is early in their career, wants to like knock it out of the park and be amazing at everything they do and realizing, oh yeah, you know, there's, there's time to not succeed in everything that I do and still be successful in my career. I think, you know, all, all of this stuff has to be led by leaders and it has to be, you know, they've got to walk the, walk the walk and, and, um, really lead by example.

And I think that's a good place to start. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think that's the one thing is that I've learned, you know, personally as a leader is, you know, you can't, you have to, let's go all the way back again to like, you know, the customers, a lot of times organizations get so big that the leader is so far removed from the actual customer that they're making decisions with really no true insights into what's happening and whatever their message they have all the way up at the top is getting filtered as it goes through. And the message is not clear. I mean, I remember this vividly. I don't, um, I don't want to name any names of this massive organization that I used to, that acquired my first company.

When I was talking to the, you know, the, the president of that division, man, I was so in line. I was like, yep, you, you get it right like this. But then as it went down to the SVPs and the VPs and the directors and the, you know, senior directors and directors and managers and everything else. And by the time it got to the floor, the reps were doing basically the exact opposite of what leadership was, was said that they were doing because they weren't there on the floor with the reps. They weren't saying it to their direct reports and their direct reports playing telephone tag all the way through. So that's why those leaders have to get on that floor. They have to sit in the bullpen. They have to listen.

They have to become a customer. And to your point, they have to lead by example and fail and show people like, Hey, I tried this and it sucked, but that's okay. Yeah. I love it. Awesome. Well, look, Greg, um, let's wrap this up. Where can people find more about, I mean, you've got eight books, you've got a bunch of stuff going on right now. So, uh, I know the new one is the house of customer, but where do you, uh, where can people find out more information about some of the work you're doing right now? Yeah, sure. So a couple of places, um, I have a website at gregkelstrom.com. You can find all my books there, your podcast blog, all of that good stuff. Um, also you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

I'm very active there. So just search for Greg Kilstrom. I think there's only one of us. So, um, it's easy enough to find as long as you can spell my name. So, yeah, I was going to say, let me spell it for people who are listening right now. It's Greg K I H L S T R O M. Check him out on LinkedIn. And I get you're also, uh, is it Mparity? Is that the, is that the company? That's so the, the CEO of Mparity wrote the forward for the book. Okay. That's what it was. Very cool. Yeah. Um, cause that was, cause he's a customer data platform, right? So that's where you can kind of, if you're looking for some stuff to, to kind of get some insights into, then you can actually invest in some technology for this as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome, Greg. Well, thank you so much for coming on, man. I really appreciate the conversation. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. And everybody else out there, I hope you, uh, enjoy the conversation as much as I did and pulled a few nuggets out of here. That'll get you to think a little bit more like the customer. And like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day went, or you think it's going, if you make somebody smile today, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I'll see you on the other side. Thank you so much for your time today and listening to the podcast.

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