Tiffani Bova - Why the Customer Isn’t Really Always Right

All right, before we get started on today's podcast discussion, I got to do a little promo here and this one's a big one. So HubSpot's annual inbound conference is coming up September 5th through the 8th here in Boston. And it's right in my backyard. I go to it every single year. It's one of the marquee events that I absolutely put on my calendar. And even if I didn't live here in Boston, I'd come to this one because this gets some of the best and brightest across sales, marketing, customer success together to talk about what's happening in the industry and share best practices, tactics, and all sorts of different things about where the industry is headed and what we need to do to drive results in this crazy big world that we're all living in right now.

And with inbound, they get some super cool guests on this and speakers. I mean, including this year is going to be Reese Witherspoon. We got Derek Jeter coming up and I know he's a Yankee, but we'll let him come to Boston because he's actually one of the Yankees I like. And then we got people like Sam Jacobs, a good friend of mine who's going to be speaking. And myself, I got a speaking engagement, so they accepted my speaking engagement at this event. It's about sales-ready messaging, where I'm going to be talking about a specific equation that we use to create sales-ready messaging that aligns sales, marketing, and CS, and you can use to implement into some of these AI tools to really drive some pretty impressive results.

So if nothing else, you're going to get some free training from me if you come to this thing. Now, there's two types of passes. You can get the general admission pass that gets you all the speakers, trainings, and programs, and then the VIP pass, which is limited availability and gives you VIP lounge access, exclusive welcome parties, and access to some of the speakers that you might not have otherwise. So you've got to come to this one again, September 5th through the 8th here in Boston. Sign up at www.inbound.com to get your ticket today. Let's make it happen. 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.

Now, today's guest is Tiffany Bova. Tiffany is one of the most experienced and decorated people I've ever had on this podcast. She's a global growth evangelist and business strategist, author of multiple bestselling books, host of her own podcast, and a world-renowned keynote speaker. Our conversation mainly revolved around the switch from a focus on the customer experience to the employee experience. Now, we've all heard the saying, the customer's always right, right? But too much focus on the customer and not enough on the employee has led to much of what we're seeing today with the great resignation, quiet quitting, and all the mental health issues that are cropping up. We talked about alignment, process, training, and everything companies need to be doing today to evolve in this new world we're all living in.

This episode is packed with insights, tips, and practical things we can all do to strike that right balance between the customer and employee experience. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Tiffany Bova, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast. Thrilled to be here, John. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I was saying on the intro here, usually a lot of people come on and say, hey, you know, long-time listener, first-time caller, and I'm going to say that to you because I've been following your career at Salesforce for a while and been just super impressed with all the stuff you're doing. So, people, the audience should know you, but just for some context here, would you give them a little background on where you're coming from and what you're up to these days?

Sure. Well, I've been in the tech industry now for 30 years, which is crazy to say out loud. It's probably pretty close to 30. It's probably 28, right? But let's round up. And I sort of grew up carrying a bag at a quota, selling software and then selling hardware and then selling full services and big transformation. And then I was very early in the cloud, sort of 2000 timeframe. I was a Loquus beta client and I was Constant Contacts beta client. So, I've watched the transition of technology sort of inject itself into the sales marketing and customer service profession. By then, I moved up from being an individual contributor all the way up to senior leadership for startups and Fortune 500. Then I spent a decade at Gartner as a research fellow covering sales transformation and indirect channel strategies.

And then Salesforce came knocking and asked me to do the same thing for Salesforce and our clients. Then I couldn't say no. So, I jumped at the chance and I've been here a little more than seven years. Love it. When did that, when that call came, were you looking for that opportunity or did that opportunity come to you just out of curiosity? It was kind of a combination of both. You know, I had been at Gartner for a decade, which was the longest job I'd ever had. During my sales career, I sort of changed jobs almost every 18 months for a good decade or so, a little more than a decade. And, you know, I learned a ton at Gartner, but I wanted sort of the next challenge. And so, I think it was a combination of both.

I think I was open to the opportunity. So, you know, when the opportunity came, I didn't just immediately sort of shut it down, you know, because things had come across my desk in the past, but I think I wasn't ready for it. And so, the timing was just right. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, I got to imagine it. And it's been seven years. So, you know, when Salesforce comes knocking, when they're the rocket ship that they are, it's kind of hard to ignore that conversation, right? Absolutely. Very cool. So, let's talk because the whole, your focus these days is on employee experience and how it should support the customer experience, right? And I want to dive into this because you write a lot in, you know, I skimmed through your book and a lot of the takeouts as well of how we've really, you know, the customer's always right, right?

I mean, that was kind of a philosophy a long time ago of, hey, the customer's always right, do everything. And shareholder value, right? Back, I don't know if it was the 70s or 80s where all of a sudden shareholder value became the thing. And it was grow at all costs, let's go and it's the customer that we need to focus on. But, you know, what you notice is there was a lot of people not focusing on the employee and I think that's coming to roost right now with the quiet quitting and everything else. So, could you give us, we're going to dive into some of the details, but give us the framework here of that journey for you of when you realize the importance of the employee experience over customer experience and then why that drove you to dive into it and do as much research as you have on the topic.

So, look, like, you know, I'm a classic salesperson. Like, I'm really focused on growth, you know, kind of all up, right? What are the levers that drive growth? So, my first book, Growth IQ, was that, right? It was sort of the 10 levers to growth. One of them was optimized sales, right? And the first one of the 10 was customer experience. So, I had been understanding, if you will, over time of the power of that customer experience and I think it really started back in 2008. I was part of the team at Gartner that made the prediction that the CMO would spend more on technology than the CIO. And when we said that, everyone thought, what are you talking about, right? Yes, yes, yes. And, but we weren't that crazy because Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce all went out and bought marketing technology, right?

In order to fill that need if the CMO was going to be now spending money on, quote unquote, technology. And it wasn't so much about marketing that we thought they were going to spend money on, although we believe that to be true. We really believed customer experience was going to be that next battleground. We believed that as companies shifted from being product-led to being customer-led as that transition was happening and technology was starting to democratize what kind of experience customers could have with companies of all sizes, right? It used to be if you're a very small business, you could never compete with a Fortune 500's marketing campaign, right? But now, you know, not that you could on the spend side, but you sure could on the presence and influence and activity and initiatives on social, right?

Or on digital, really powered by, quote unquote, the cloud, right? And so when we did that, that really began my understanding of the power of customer experience versus just saying it to your point, you know, Steve Jobs, don't start with the technology, start with the customer and work back, right? Herb Kelleher, right? Start with the employee, then it goes to the customer and then you drive growth, you know? Richard Branson, like there's a lot of people that have said things that really understood that experience and the customer more specifically was critical. But what was missing, and by the way, in full transparency, like I missed a lot of talk and conversation in my first book on employee.

When I wrote the chapter on customer, I mentioned it, obviously, you need happy employees. But the aha moment for me individually, I think we all have them in different ways, but I was standing on stage in Vancouver, Canada at an event. I said, I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce is a great place to work pretty much globally. It's one of the most innovative companies in the world and it's the fastest growing enterprise software company. I said, I didn't think that was a coincidence. So, and that goes along this, right? If you have happy employees, they're more willing to innovate, go the extra mile, they're engaged. And then you, obviously, you get the result of growth. So could I prove it?

And that was really the journey for me was it started and was rooted in customer experience, not an employee because HR and sort of the employee lane, if you will, has not been one I spent a lot of time in. So I kind of had to really learn and, you know, to be clear, I'm talking about employee experience during the moments that matter when an employee touches a customer in some way on a customer service call and a sales call and a marketing, you know, the FAQs, you know, anything that touches the customer, that's what I mean in this conversation around EX and CX. Hey, I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, filling the funnel and driving to close.

It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like ChatGPT and how to leverage it in the sales process. And it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. You get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code PODCAST, you'll get 20% off. Let's make this happen together. So I want to dive into this because this is something that I've been, and I think it addresses both, and it's specific to Salesforce too. You know, the predictable revenue model, right?

Which Salesforce really, I guess, revolutionized and introduced, which is the segmentation of roles, right? So you have the inbound reps, you have the outbound reps, then you have the AEs. I always looked at that as, because I did that my first company too, before I even knew about Salesforce. And because I just realized like one sales rep has a really hard time doing all these things and doing them well, especially at scale. But the challenge was to me that, you know, after thinking it through a lot, it's that it's not exactly, if not done right, that model isn't exactly customer centric, right? Because it gets handed off three times before, you know, at least the bastardized version of it, right?

I'm going to talk about how it's been implemented across the board with some customers, where it's like, okay, I talked to this person, but then I have to talk to this person, then I have to talk to this person. So it's not necessarily such a great customer experience, which I think has now led to a bad employee experience, because they feel like they're a cog in a wheel, as opposed to a solution provider, as somebody who's having, you know, really good, valuable questions. So can you talk me through a little bit about how, how this model of segmentation is, is needs to evolve here in the future to address the customer experience and the employee experience without everybody feeling so siloed and that, oh, that's, you know, my, my job stops here.

So therefore I can't, right. And again, I'm not, there are certain companies that are doing this far better than others, as far as that, that experience all the, all the way, but at a very generic sense, that's my concern. And so could you help me understand how we need to evolve right now with both models to make sure that we address the customer and the employee? I think a lot of times the silo is driven by the fact that there are different KPIs and different metrics and different quotas assigned to each of those quote unquote groups that you just described. And I am not a fan of silos necessarily, but I am a fan of building bridges between groups to make sure they stay connected in some way.

Right. So it could be how to pass off leads in efficient and effective matter. It could be follow up, follow through. It could be pre-sales, post-sales, right. Customer success teams really playing a role of kind of post-sales. And you wouldn't argue that they're in the sales organization, but they are in the, in the revenue generation organization. Right. And so thinking about those roles, sometimes organizations will, companies, right, and sales leaders will slice that pie really thin so that they can understand what's happening in each of those groups. Where are the leads coming from? What's the quality of the leads? What's the process? Like what revenue is being generated from that spend?

And so it's all very internally focused. It's how we run our company. The customer doesn't care if they're talking to a BDR, an AE, you know, a CSR. Like it just, it just does not matter to them. You know, there's, there's kind of two things I know for sure. One of them is, and not that we're talking about that right now, is that sales reps don't wake up to data enter. That's one thing I know for sure. That's a fact. The second thing I know for sure though, is customers don't wake up every day and go, my God, today is such a great day. I'm going from stage three to stage four in the sales process. Like that's also not what they do. Or I get to talk to a BDR because yesterday I talked to an AE.

Like those are all very internal conversations and internal journeys we force upon our customers. And so that goes back to, if you're going to streamline and drive out friction from the sales motion, then you have to think about all of those handoffs, right? All of the different groups and the roles. And is it necessary from a customer standpoint or is it only necessary from a, I'm trying to manage my people standpoint? And I think that's where you start to uncover some unique things that will get you focused on the right aspects of improving that journey, not only for your customer, but also for your sales teams. So do you, because I think, you know, I bring this again back to the employee satisfaction, if you will, right?

Because you hear in every organization how sales and marketing are just misaligned, right? And marketing's always wondering why sales isn't following up on leads. And sales is always looking at marketing saying these leads are crap and why should I even follow up with this? And that, a lot of that has to do with that internal bickering and the, you know, the, just the, the weight of, of people complaining. So how do you, like for a company that's kind of gotten itself into this, and I don't want to say mess, because look, we, I think there's, there's good and bad of everything, but right now, I think we're at an inflection point with what, because a lot of what got us into this mess, and I'll, I'm going to talk tech and SaaS specifically here.

A lot of what got us here is not going to be the mentality that gets us out of here, right? I mean, we, growth at all costs, over-engineered the sales process. You had mentioned it, you know, all this technology, we are less efficient and less effective than we've ever been. Every Gartner study talks about how they, you know, the efficiency of a sales rep is down. So how do we need to reset right now? And what's a, what's a way that if you're a leader out there listening to this, that you need to kind of take a step back and look at it? Do you need to start with the customer experience all the way through and see what that looks like from an outsider's perspective or start with the employee experience, or is there a framework you can use to start to tackle this challenge that I think a lot of people are in right now?

Yeah, it's a great question. And, and, and here's what I'd say. Let me start with the first comment you made about sales and marketing. I've run both simultaneously and argued with myself, right? So your leads are crap. Thanks. Like, you know, right. Okay. So, uh, you know, all joking aside, um, I think that I'll start with some basics, like a marketing qualified lead. Let's just start there. How does marketing define that? And how does sales define that? I'm going to guess if you've never defined it, people would not agree. Sales most likely will say, I just need to close the deal, right? Marketing may say we've qualified that they are, you know, the right size, you know, um, they've downloaded these three or four things.

We, we know that they're interested in us and it's warm, but it's not hot, right? Like we are passing it to you sales team. So you can do what you are really good at doing, right? Taking that customer from where they are on their journey and filling in those gaps. Because we all know that over the last 15 or 20 years, right? Customers have gotten far smarter in their buying journey. So they know more than they knew. When I first started selling technology, I was far more knowledgeable. Now that isn't always the case, right? Customers know a lot more than they always did. So start with the basics, like definitions. What is a qualified lead? What is your role? What is our role? How does the handoff need to happen?

What's the feedback loop on if those leads are not good, instead of just going, I'm not going to follow up on them or they're crap, or, you know, you're complaining to your manager. What is that feedback loop back to marketing? So when I was still at Gartner, you know, I used to ask this question a lot when I was in front of marketers, I would ask them, how many of you have gone on a sales call this quarter? Now, you know, now things have changed a little bit, right? It's a little hybrid. Sometimes it's virtual, but let's, you know, how many of you have gone on a sales call? In a room of 150 marketers, maybe three would raise their hand. So I'd say, so you have no idea how all these marketing materials you're generating are actually working in the field.

Like you're not seeing that when your AE or sales rep opens their laptop and starts going through the corporate presentation that the customer goes, actually, I don't want to see that, or I'm not interested. Let's just talk about this, you know, or leave behinds are, yeah, could you just give me, you will see in real time how these things you're spending a lot of time and energy and cycles on may not be used, effective, or even desired by the customer in the field. Now, the caveat on that, the little asterisk is do not go and go, I'm a marketer and I'm just here shadowing sales to see how our stuff works in the field. Like what I want you to do is actually say, I'm a new sales rep and I'm shadowing, you know, John, or I'm shadowing Tiffany.

Um, and so I just, you know, I'm just here, I'm just observing. And so you will hear the real feedback. And if it's a video call, do it as well. If it's in person, you know, do it as well. Like it gives you an opportunity to really see what's happening versus having this perception that sales is just doesn't care about the leads because that couldn't be further from the truth. It's just, you have to get better. We all have to get better on that communication back and forth. And then the same thing from a sales perspective, sales manager, um, you know, spend time in the marketing meetings, understand what the spend is, why they're allocating it, where they're allocating it. The more you understand and listen, um, you will have the ability to then get your team on board.

So that's kind of the marketing and sales comment. Now on the sort of fixing that process comment, um, I, you know, there's, there's a couple of stats that I hold on to. So John, you said, you know, like you feel like it's getting worse and, you know, we're kind of, we're really at a, a point, a turning point. And I'd, I'd push back a little bit on that because over the last 10, 12, 13 years, quota attainment has remained almost flat globally at about 54%. Okay. Okay. Also during that time, the amount or percentage of time a seller spends selling has also remained fairly flat. And right now it's down. It's only 28% of a seller's time is spent selling. Now that stat comes from the state of sales from Salesforce.

The quota one comes from CSO insights, which is now, uh, um, uh, part of corn fairy. And so if you look at those two stats and you could then argue the gallop of customer or employee satisfaction has also remained fairly flat over the last 10 or 12 years. So if we've been investing at this rapid pace from a technology stack perspective and quota attainment has remained flat and time selling has kind of gone down, you know, they're kind of going like 28, 32, 26, you know, and then 55, you know, it's just not meaningful. If you will, what is wrong, right? I would argue we do not have a technology problem. And I know it's not lost on me. I work at Salesforce. Like I understand that, but I started using a single user version of act and gold mine.

Like I have done it all the way through, you know, an actual Rolodex on my desk, running a multimillion dollar business, $110 million business, actually recurring revenue in an Excel spreadsheet. So I can tell you that I've seen it all and if we, you know, and back then sort of 2000 when I was 2001, when I was a Locos beta client, there was maybe a dozen MarTech technology in the stack that was getting tracked. There's over 9,000 now that are being tracked. So once again, that's why we don't have a technology problem. So we have a people process problem. And so this is where selling organizations really need to step back, analyze what a seller does in their day. And so if you're a large enough selling organization, stand up a pop-up team of a handful of sellers and let them loose of all the processes that they have to follow and the metrics that you're holding them against and watch them use the technology in the most efficient way possible and how quickly they may be able to move through everything.

That will show you that there are ways and places that you can actually course correct. And then this is why in the state of sales, we've seen over the last two, so we're at the fifth edition. So the fourth and fifth edition of it over the last sort of three years, we've seen sales ops really step up to become far more important to the success of an organization. And that's where sales ops can really play that intermediary role between marketing and sales, between sales and customer success or customer service. Like they could really keep the organization away from tech stack bloat, right? And also to ensure that the processes aren't so unwieldy that it takes, you know, so much time. Remember, 28% of their time is spent selling.

Yeah. If you could just give them 10% back time selling or 20% back time selling, you're not going to get one for one on quota attainment. But I'd argue you most definitely will get higher quota attainment. I don't know how much, right? But it will go up. And so it's that kind of hard work that sales leaders and sales managers have to focus on. Yeah, I think that process piece. And then the other thing that scares me is that I feel like we've over-engineered it, like I was saying earlier, and we've lost sight of the fundamentals in a lot of ways from a just, you know, and I'm going to talk about this from a sales training standpoint, right? It's like a lot of this is we teach the tech first and then, you know, we teach them to have a conversation versus teaching them the foundational components of empathy and curiosity.

And all that other stuff. And then giving the technology. What's that balance, Tiffany, especially now, right? Because when you and I first got into sales, like, I don't know about you, I didn't get a ton of great sales training, right? But I was in the bullpen. I was meeting people face to face. And so I was learning through pure osmosis, right? And a lot of that is just lost right now. And I want to get later on to how to motivate a remote workforce. But I want to stick on this point of what do we train sales reps on right now to be able to succeed in this world of AI coming from every angle? And, you know, who knows what the next evolution is going to be? But the personal conversation, like the ability to have a conversation and be curious, but also use the technology to alleviate that other 70% of the administrative is going to be critical for a sales rep to succeed moving forward.

So what do we need to be teaching these reps and the succession, if you will, of that education? Yeah, I call this the seller's dilemma. I sort of coined this term when I was still at Gartner. And the seller's dilemma is twofold. And it's a play on Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, if you've read that book. And so, you know, Clay was great on saying, look, the challenges you face are sort of this crisis of prioritizing. Where are you going to innovate and invest? So let's go to this sort of seller's dilemma is as a sales leader, you are responsible for hitting quota numbers and bringing in revenue right now today. Yep. Because if you don't hit your quota over a course of a quarter, two or three, depending on where you work, you may not have your role anymore.

Yep. While at the same time, you have to innovate, you have to transform, you have to optimize. All the things we just talked about, like journey mapping your sales process, connecting the teams between sales and marketing, putting in the effort of working with sales ops, putting a pop-up team, all the things, right, that we just talked about. And doing those things simultaneously is really difficult. Yeah. Because most of the time, sales leaders grew up in the selling organization and they were high-performing sellers. So they tend to then run the selling organization the way that they needed to be managed themselves, or it's just all about the sale. And they don't know what they don't know, right?

They don't have that managerial experience. Not about motivating a team, but I mean in optimizing and transforming a selling organization. Like, we're not grouped by role right now. I want to. I want to segment. I don't know how. How should I segment? I want to streamline the selling process. I don't even know where to start. Like, those kinds of things, many sales managers, and no fault of their own, right, they just get promoted and they're focused on one side of that dilemma, hit numbers right now. So if you think about that, now I'm going to reference some Bain research that they did that when looking at where managers spend their time, quote unquote, coaching, that most of it is around that administrative, right?

How to, you know, place an order, how to enter something in the CRM system, how to use Salesforce, you know, how to use, you know, Einstein GPT, how to, you know, do a video call, whatever, whatever the how-to, but very much job-oriented. And a very small percentage, unfortunately, is around on the coaching of empathy, understanding, listening, better question asking. And if you don't believe that statement, they also found that it was some, I think it's in the 40% range, only 40, I think it's 47% of sales reps would not spend $1 for one hour of their manager's time. So if they're not going to even spend $1 for your time, now let me, let me double click into why I think that happens. So pre-Salesforce, you know, or pre-CRM, John and I have a conversation.

I'm his manager. He works for me. John, tell me about this deal. Why is this stalled? What's happening? Who are you talking to? What other buyers or, you know, what other influencers are in the deal? Asking all these questions, right? CRM shows up. Sales rep is required to enter the information into the CRM system. And I show up with John and I say, John, tell me about this deal. Where is it in the deal? Who's in the deal? What other buyers? And John says to himself, or maybe says it out loud. I don't know. But let's say John says to himself, why am I spending all this time data entering if my manager is not looking at it anyway? And so you're regurgitating what's already in the system. So it's the manager's responsibility to change that dynamic and say, all right, we are going to spend time on what deals do you want me to help you on and what areas do you want to work on, right?

Is it storytelling? Is it overcoming objections? Whatever it might be. Now, all of a sudden, the CRM system is that single source of truth because everybody's going into it to see what's happening in the business. Now, I'm not saying that the manager won't ever ask a question about a deal, but if it's 90% about information that's in the CRM, you're signaling to your people that you're not looking. And if you're not looking, guess what ends up happening? They stop using it. They stop using it. So, you know, this is also not just about the sales rep. This is about managers also continuing to be a student of their own profession, which is how do I get better at coaching? So I'm going to take a class on how to coach better, right?

Or I'm going to take a class on how to inspire people to, you know, really change. Change is hard, especially if you have a high-performing selling organization, they feel like they know what they're doing. So that's where the people side of it, the career side of it, those kinds of investments, those are the best bosses when they're really focused in on making you the best person you can be beyond the blocking and tackling tactics that are involved in the sales career, in the sales profession. I think you spot it. I mean, I think, well, let's transition to the real true employee experience because I think a lot of the employee experience is made negative by all the meetings and the tracking and the administrative stuff that doesn't get leveraged, right?

I mean, I tell people all the time, the biggest fail of a CRM implementation isn't, the reason that reps don't like putting information in isn't because they don't like putting the information in, it's because they get no value because they put it in, right? If you were to tell me, John, make sure you track all this stuff, but then the output of that was, well, now based on that, I'm going to tell you exactly where in your sales process you need the most help. And I'm going to go invest in training for that piece to get you to better. So I'm all in. I will track everything that you want, but if you just get me to track stuff, just to track stuff or meetings, just to have meetings, right? I'm now just checked out most of the time.

It's the same thing with the customer experience with demos, like reps just light up their demo and they drone through it and the customer immediately checks out because there's no engagement. There's no value other than a one-way communicate. So with that transition to the employee experience and how important it truly is to have people motivated, so they're not quiet quitting, so they're not going through the motions in front of your customer. How do you even start to understand what your existing employee experience is? Is it simply a survey? Is it you as a leader getting back in and interviewing people with intention? Say you're sitting there listening to this and saying, all right, we're kind of in a mess right now.

We're at a transition point. We're at an inflection point right now. We've tried to make sure that the customer experience is good. But I've had a few people leave recently and I don't know why. And I feel like there's some quiet quitting going on right now. How do you do you do a hard reset and come to mea culpa as a CEO and say, hey, look, I understand? Or do you start doing some surveys just to get us strengths or you talk to other leadership? Walk me through that approach right there of how you start to get a handle on your employee experience genuinely, what your employee experience is. All up or in sales only? All up? I would say let's go all up. All up. All up. Yeah. So either way, either it's all up corporately or in the sales organization.

This is where becoming a master asker of questions and then becoming a really good listener. So surveys are good. But what we found from our research was that most companies do surveys. 76% of them don't know what to do with the data they collect. And then with the data they collect, there is no one who's responsible. There is no one who quote unquote owns employee experience. So if nobody owns it, no one's focused on it. Now, I don't mean that we have to have, you know, a C-suite executive focused on employee experience. Everybody should be focused on employee experience, right? So you can do one big survey, but I would recommend sort of by group as senior leaders, right? Asking those leaders of that group.

So let's pick sales, right? That if you pick the sales leader and say, I want you to survey your team, but let's start by understanding how much time they're actually spending selling. And so do you know if it's 28%? Do you know what it is? Now, you don't have to be exact, but if you ask people to track their day for a week of how much customer time, how much administrative time, you know, pick a handful of buckets, you very quickly would know where you have area for improvement. Now, once you know that information, now you need to go and try and fix it, right? So if you see that there's a lot of time spent on having to actually hand off a deal that's closed over to finance and you have to go into two or three systems to do it, then the question becomes, how do we automate that transition, right?

How do we automate that transfer or that handoff? And so if you can start to uncover and find those big chunks of time, guess what happens? Now you've engendered trust between you and the employees because you asked, they answered, you heard them and you fixed it. Now you won't be able to fix everything, but you're looking for those big buckets of stuff, right? That is wasting a tremendous amount of time. That's highly inefficient and not productive, right? This is not about, I want more productivity out of my people. It's in the eight hour day. I want them to spend more time selling, right? More time in front of the customer, more time working on deals. And that's where tech can really start to automate, right?

Where predictive can come into place, where AI can come into place. And so how do you start by there? Now, you could do one question. If we could fix one thing in the selling organization as it relates to technology, what would it be? If we could fix one thing as it relates to, you know, the processes, what would it be? The training, what would it be? Like, and ask them what's the one thing and make them pick one thing because then it's not kind of unwieldy. Hopefully you'll start to see that there is commonality between what people are saying and you could bucketize it. And now you could put together a team, you know, with your sales ops, or you can carve out, you know, one or two people from your sales team, depending on how large you are.

And then you can go after those things that need to be fixed. Now, as you start to fix those things, then you want to survey how much of your time has been selling. Is quota attainment moving? And so you're constantly adjusting because everything is moving so fast, as you said, John, right? What got us here isn't going to get us there. But once you think you're going to fix these things, and then a quarter later, it's no longer effective. So it is a constant exercise. That's why sales ops has become so vitally important. So I would say regardless of where you are in the organization, start asking questions, listen, decide where you're going to actually, you know, do some adjusting and fixing.

Communicate back that you fixed it. Even you could create something like an advisory board. You could do an internal employee or sales advisory board for sellers internally. I'm not talking about a customer advisory board of your sales team. And you meet quarterly, and you find the three or four or five big things that you could fix to give time back, you know, help get better output, make sure you're training and coaching on the right topics. All right, we're going to take a quick break here to highlight the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. And I love listening to the podcasts on this network, and specifically, Another Byte, hosted by John Dick, Jory Monroe, and Ariel Bosworth.

And the reason I love this one is because they focus on one of my favorite shows on television, which is Shark Tank. And what's cool about it is they take the episodes and they break them down and talk about how they can apply to our own businesses and real world application of it. You know, a lot of us, you can look at it for entertainment for that show. But what they do with Another Byte, they talk about how it applies to us, which I absolutely love. And one of the episodes that they had recently was called When Community is More Valuable Than Unit Economics. And this was with the Magic 5, Spike Ball, and Yura Kayak. And they talk about Magic 5's value in human data and problems to scale, Spike Ball's community building tactics and targeting issues, and also Yura Kayak's social proof problem and missing customer acquisition costs.

So again, all super applicable to all of us in the startup world. And I absolutely love listening to their analysis and dissection of these shows. So listen to Another Byte wherever you get your podcasts and keep supporting the HubSpot Podcast Network. Now let's get back to the conversation. Cute. Yeah, I love that. I mean, because there is, I mean, at the end of the day, it's about, you know, constant iteration, right? Again, the agile framework right now, if you're not agile, you're getting less. And that means what worked six months ago is not working right now, whether that's internally or externally. So who are some companies that you're, based on all the conversations you've had with people and research you've done, who are some of the companies that are doing this right, that have kind of taken that step back and really leaned into the employee experience and seen some results because of that focus, as opposed to, you know, customers always right type of thing.

But no, no, no, we're going to reverse engineer this and start with our employees. And then have you got, have you seen any like transformational? I know there's a lot of companies, Salesforce included, that are doing some really good things. But have you ever seen one where it's been a transformational shift when they made that, that, that refocus on the employee experience? So I'm going to answer it this way, you know, in the research that we did, the first one was, was US only. The second one we did was global. And when I started to communicate and share the first one that was US only around, around the globe, this was, you know, in the sort of tail end of middle of 21. So we were still in a lockdown mode, if you will, we weren't, we weren't traveling.

I wasn't traveling anyway. I don't know about other people, but I wasn't traveling. And, and here's what I heard. If it's so obvious, why isn't everyone doing it? We're doing pieces and parts of this, but we're not doing it consistently across the organization. We really had a problem in our call center. We worked really hard to fix that. But now we're seeing an issue over here. So what I, I definitely want to state is, um, for all that was awful about what happened with the pandemic, what's come out of it is this greater focus on employee. They've become the number one stakeholder to a long-term success by the Edelman groups. First time it's overtaken customer in a decade. And so if employee is most important stakeholder, it isn't that customers are not important.

Um, what we found from the research was if you want to create a better customer experience, you're able to do it, but it will start to plateau unless you get the employee experience improving as well. So what has happened over the last 20 years of this focus on, you know, kind of sense the internet, this reducing effort for customer. Oh, it used to be seven clicks to buy on a website. And then it was like, nope, the golden rule is three. You know, maybe it's even two now, maybe it's, you know, one click also changed things, but let's say, right. That was all about reducing effort. I don't want to have to poke around through the website because I may lose them along the way. So the faster I can get them through, the better it would be on the backend.

And I can, I'll just talk about what we did. A lot of it was manual on the back because technology hadn't caught up yet to e-commerce tying into the financial systems, tying into, you know, the service organization, tying into provisioning all the things that were attached to it. So the people are running around behind the scenes. Well, what happened was the customer effort went down. The employee effort went up. The customer experience went up. The employee experience went down. And as we've accelerated on this digital transformation over the last, you know, two decades, we've seen that actually continue experience for the customer goes up. Effort goes down experience for employee doesn't always go up and effort most definitely, uh, is going up.

So how do we, uh, improve that? We also learned that it has to start with employee. You're going to get lift. If your customers are happier, let's just say in the call center, if your customers aren't yelling at your call center agents every day, probably going to make them feel better about their job. Right. But it will only go so far. Um, but if you have really happy employees, then it becomes this flywheel of your employees feel safe, trusted, supported, trained. They have the right tools. Um, seamless tech silos are broken down. Data is shared. Integration is happening. They're humming on all cylinders. They're like, bring on the day. Right. Um, but we don't see that as much. Um, and a lot of it sits unfortunately in this outdated tech, lack of integration between technology, data silos, uh, you know, the process layer is so broken that we really have to do a lot of work here.

And the more mature an organization is, the more broken those processes are, unfortunately, um, bad hygiene along the way. Right. So even if you cleaned it up, bad habits will show back up and you end up having to clean it up again. So you either have to really put some rigor into change management and ops, right. And process management. Um, otherwise you will do a heavy lift to clean it up and you'll find yourself right back there again in a year or two. I was going to say, what are some things that you should not do? Right. So, so, okay, cool. I'm a leader now. I got to figure out, I got to realign. I got to listen to my employees and everything else. And then there's like the check the box version of that.

And then there's the actual doing the work. And I think some of the check the box stuff actually does more harm than good. And I'll, I'll bring that very local to like, uh, you know, the sales training world, right? Where sales training, it's almost like reps are, are the book of the month club, right? It's like, well, this quarter we're going to do challenger sale and next quarter we're going to do this sale. And then we're going to do this. And then eventually they just roll their eyes and say, none of this matters. Cause nobody's going to hold me accountable. Nobody's going to reinforcement this, us, and I just got to show up to these stupid things so I can check off the box. So what are some things that companies that might are, are doing that seemingly are well intentioned to try to address this employee experience, but are actually doing more harm than good?

Um, I'll go back to the example I gave about a sales manager who's grown up in sales. Um, one big mistake is they think everybody will sell like them and high performers have a very unique way of selling. And you can train people, uh, this is a Mike Bosworth, uh, uh, uh, formula, but you've got a performers of sellers. It's like 14 to 17% of salespeople were born to sell. Um, then you've got 65% of sellers kind of B sellers, um, which they are workhorses, teach them how to sell, teach them the process. They could come from any industry, right? But they're, they're committed, they work, they follow the process, right? They get better with every day. And this isn't about quota attainment. This is about behavior.

Um, and so if you're a, you know, an A performer and become a manager, not everyone's an A performer. So I think that one of the things is understanding what your people need. So instead of telling and thinking what worked for you is going to work for everyone, you know, really having that empathy, um, and willingness to say, I don't know. So I'm going to sit down with everybody and understand how they like to be managed, right? How they like to be motivated. Um, you know, what are the things we could improve, you know, and establish that one-on-one relationship, um, it's uncomfortable, right? It's, uh, it's, it's stressful for people to, you know, show up that being that vulnerable, both as a new manager and as an, you know, person that works for them.

But that would be one thing I think, uh, you know, in the sales community, as people move up, that they think what worked for them will work for others. Um, and they're not willing to listen. Um, and they think because they've been so successful, they know how to do it. Uh, so I, I think that that is one area, um, where that's a blind spot. When you continue to get higher and higher and higher in an organization, they're so far removed from the day-to-day life of a seller, an individual quota bearing seller that they don't know what their day is actually like. So the further you get up, the more time I actually want you to spend in the call center, out on sales calls so you can see how the decisions you are making from the corner office have intended or unintended consequence on the people doing the work.

Um, so it's, it's really this kind of managed by wandering around, very Tom Peters, right? Managed by wandering around, like get out, see your people, ask questions, do not manage from a spreadsheet or a report, you know, or a Salesforce report, Salesforce report or whatever it might be, um, really get out there and get with your people. And so I'd say that, that what they get wrong the most is they are so, there's such a large gap between what the C-suite thinks is happening and what the employees thinks is happening, um, that it is holding companies back from, from realizing growth. A hundred percent. It's like, you know, I, when we got acquired, uh, my first little company got acquired by Staples.

I remember sitting in the boardroom and when I was talking to the executives, I was like, all this stuff makes great sense. I love what you guys are talking about. I just want to let you know that as this filters down to the individual contributors of the front lines, none of it's translating because they're not doing it. And, and I think now more than ever that, that advice is, I, I hope that leaders, uh, who are listening to this, uh, implement the, because not only does it improve, improve the employee experience, it improves the customer experience for you to get out there on those front lines and go on some sales calls and sit in some calls or whatever it might be to listen to the customer and, and hear about their challenges, but also listen to how the sales professional or whoever it is that you're trying to figure out is, is presenting that information and then what they're dealing with on a day to day, you know, even the objections that they're, we're dealing with now are different than the objections were six months ago.

Right. And, and being able to listen to that and then make decisions based on real information, um, uh, that, that you're living versus a spreadsheet to your point. I think that's the frustrating part that most other employees just again, roll up their, roll their eyes and be like, yeah, okay. That might sound great on a, on a spreadsheet. But in reality, when I talk to the customer, this is what's happening. So I always, I always defer to undercover boss for us audience listening to this, right? Undercover boss is a great example of that. You know, a C-suite will go out, you know, within their organization. I don't know why they spend five minutes, seven minutes on, you know, putting on disguise so that no one recognizes them because no one would recognize them anyway, because they never leave their office.

Yeah, no kidding. But, but what they're out there trying to understand is the employee story. They're not talking to customers. They're very focused on employee. And if you've ever watched the show, you're like, how do you not know this is happening in your company? How do you not know that your, your, your supply closets look like a Tasmanian devil ran through it. And, and none of this inventory is even tagged. You don't even, you have millions of dollars worth of inventory sitting back there that nobody even knows about. And you have a revenue and profitability problem and you're trying to figure out what it is. And unless you had walked into the store and opened up the storage closet, you wouldn't have seen all of it.

And how come not only did you not know it, but why is it your frontline telling someone maybe they are, but then that person isn't telling someone and maybe they are. But by the time it gets to the C-suite, no one wants to cop to the fact that there's $10 million worth of, you know, unaccounted for inventory sitting in storage rooms. But that is an employee experience problem, right? Retail is a great example. It has the highest, one of the highest turnovers. You know, it's a thankless job. It's mostly part-time. There's no sort of, you know, love or commitment or willingness. It's just check the box. I have a job. I made a hundred bucks today. Right. And so that is why employee is now this missing link that has been ignored for so long, especially when we crossed into the fourth industrial revolution.

It's where you really started to see that disconnect between employee and customer because we were so hyper-focused on improving the customer experience that in many ways we left the employee behind. And that fourth revolution, that's when the shareholder value stuff came. When was the fourth industrial revolution from your perspective? Sort of beginning of 2000s. Okay. Yeah. Right in there. Yeah. Right in there. Let's finish on this one. EX gone too far. And I say that because there's this, I'm a little worried right now that we've swung the pendulum a little bit too far on the side of, of the, in some cases, the employee experience or, and I'm going to say, you know, like the mental health piece, which is, I'm so excited that we're having this conversation out loud, but then there's also the potentially taking advantage of the employee experience and the mental health and that type of thing.

So how do we walk this line of making sure alignment and everything, and there's trust built, but there's also some work ethic that needs to be put in place here. Like people need to do their jobs. They need to, you know, make sure that they're showing up with their full self, right. And not having side hustles, not quiet quitting and all this other stuff. So where's the balance of accountability on the employee side? Cause we've talked a lot about the employer side now about, Hey, we need to focus on this and make sure that we're really, you know, diving in here. But there's also an accountability on the, on the, on the employee side to not take advantage of, uh, kind of where we are in our macroeconomic situation right now.

What's that balance? Yeah. I, I worry that you may, I don't think we over pivoted to employee because we were lacking so many things that, right. But what I'm worried about now is not that it's over indexed is that many are pulling back on the things that we changed that employees actually really appreciate it. Okay. Like what I don't agree. I mean, I, I do agree with you on, we have to make for sure performance and productivity, you know, and results and people are doing what they say. All of those things are vitally important and I'm not minimizing it. Um, but I, but I want to make sure, right. That we don't go, well, we've made it through the pandemic, but now we have a productivity problem.

We're going to pull everything back. We're to force everyone back into the office. And that's what we're going to do. Right. Because I think that the last couple of years, um, people have made different decisions about their lives and we have to find a way to be able to do both. Will it always be perfect if someone's sitting in the office, people are still surfing the web and doing personal stuff and whatever. Right. I mean, and if they're from home, I find my, I've worked from home almost 18 years now. So, you know, and I'm, I'm hyperproductive, but I will work on a weekend. If I, if I have to do something on a Monday afternoon, I'll pick up a couple hours on a Saturday, my choice. Right. But ultimately, um, I think that when people are really happy, uh, and engaged, um, and committed to what the company is doing, amazing things can happen.

So the best thing I can say is when you make a decision for a customer, when you change something for the customer, when you decide you want to do something for the customer, I just want you to pause for a second and say, okay, what is the impact to the employee? If I could get you to just ask that question, then it was a success, right? The work that I did, the new book, the experience mindset, all of that will be a success if you just stop and ask that question. So that way we try to close that gap and we make sure we don't make mistakes any further. So if it's, look, I'm going to put them on a class, you know, uh, um, or I'm going to, I'm sorry, I'm going to, you know, launch, uh, video conference calls for service, the service organization, because our customers want that, right?

Customers are right. That's what they want. And then on the backside, I haven't trained the employees. Like it's not integrated with the rest of the system. Like even though that's what customers want, we need to wait until it's right for the customer. Otherwise it's going to fail. And then who gets yelled at? The employees. So, you know, I think that there's room for improvement, but I hope people don't overcorrect back to the way that it used to be. You know, I want the pendulum to improve on the employee side, uh, can, you know, and then do that in a way that is, you know, predictable and you can track it and you're getting out the performance. Yeah. I think a lot of it has to do with just the overall trust in, in the organization and, and a feeling of being something bigger than just your job.

I think that's a, that's the piece that leadership, and, and also I think quite frankly, the values component to this, which is what I've been, you know, talking a lot about right now is, which is, I do believe that we all need to kind of reset on the core values and make sure that we're living them and then align those core values with our employees and our customers. Because, you know, if you have those core values that are aligned, then we can get through whatever argument or anything else that we're going to have. But if you and I are different on the core values piece of this, so that's why companies from a hiring standpoint, here's our core values. And if one of those is basically work your ass off or whatever it is, then you need to go find people who are willing to do that.

And to your point, work on the weekends and not have to think about it. Right. But if you're not, if it's it, then look for different types of people. Cause that alignment right now, it goes back to what got us here is not going to get us, get us there. Like we were able to grow at all costs, butts in seats, go, go, go, go, go. And kind of ignore a lot of that. Hey, here's our vision, here's our values. And we want to make sure that we're all aligned here. We're just getting employees and customers because we can. And now I think there's a reset of that. And I think if we reset on that with values and vision and why and all that other stuff and a lot and how higher towards that, then we're going to be moving in this right direction.

So. Fantastic. Well, Tiffany, I could, I would love to dive into a million other things with you here, but in the interest of time and, and respect of yours, uh, we should wrap things up here. Is there anything, um, well, first of all, I mean, you, you got a bunch of stuff going on right now as far as the books and, and all the things that you're doing right now. So how can people, how can people find out more and where, where do you think, um, where should they go right now, especially with what's happening right now? Where do you think the highest value is to engage with you at this point? Yeah. You could follow me on social media. I'm, I'm super active. Uh, you can follow me on LinkedIn. I've maxed out on connections apparently.

So you have to follow me. Isn't that such a, by the way, isn't that such a terrible humble brag? Like I've hit the 30,000 limit and I'm like, I'm sorry, I can't. I'm like, this sucks. But yeah, I've got a new book coming out, uh, June 6th called the experience mindset. The first book, uh, growth IQ is, is a great read for, for, um, you know, people in the sales profession. Um, but you know, that's, those are probably the, uh, the best ways to keep in touch with me, but thank you, John, for having me. I, I loved our conversation. I always enjoy talking about sales. Likewise. And thank you so much, Stephanie, for coming on board here. And look, everybody, thank you so much for listening as always.

Uh, and as I always say at the end of all these podcasts, right, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day's going or how bad you think it went, 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 will see you on the other side. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going. It would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network.

Also check out my new website at www.johnmichaelbarrows.com where you'll find even more ways to engage. There's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day just like you are, and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and let's make this happen together.