Beyond the Score: Turning Experience Data Into Revenue Intelligence

0:06
Well, welcome to the Alcamer Vista XM webinar.

0:09
Today I’m really excited to be joined by my close friend and founder and CEO of Vista XM, Eric Vogel.

0:15
And today during this webinar, we’re going to really talk about how do we move beyond traditional CX scores and measures and turn that experience data into revenue intelligence.

0:26
So I’ll start.

0:27
I’m Brandon Hodges, your host today.

0:29
I’m the Chief Revenue Officer at Alcamer.

0:31
We’ve been around for a little over 20 years helping companies actually turn feedback into action.

0:37
And we’ve partnered with Vista XM and I’ll let Eric introduce himself.

0:42
But I’m really excited about the partnership that we have and, and the strategic direction we’re taking with B to B companies and actually helping them drive significant change in their organizations by doing more than just capturing scores, but turning that into action.

0:56
So Eric, why don’t you introduce yourself for us?

0:58
Well, thanks, Brandon, and super excited to talk to you today.

1:02
I am the founder and CEO of Vista XM.

1:05
I’ve spent a lot of years, let’s say over a decade in the customer experience space.

1:10
I built CX programs for large OEM IT manufacturers.

1:15
I’ve worked in the software side of IT on Southside and a few years ago we started Vista XM.

1:21
We’re essentially we are running programs for our customers.

1:25
So we bring together all of the necessary skill sets, the playbooks, the process, the methods and the underlying technology in order to deliver world class experience programs.

1:37
And like Brandon mentioned, we are really focused on how do you take traditional customer experience programs and rethink of these programs in terms of how do we drive real revenue, how do we drive increased sales, better customer retention, better customer expansion.

1:53
So moving beyond, you know, traditional NPS and CSAT scores and really thinking of it in, in revenue terms, like we like to say Vista XM, nobody spends NPS points, you spend dollars.

2:06
So these programs really need to be tied to revenue outcomes.

2:11
And that’s really what we focus on at this to XM.

2:13
No, that’s great, Eric.

2:15
I think over the last 10 years that you and I have known each other, been working together.

2:18
I think that’s what’s always stood out to me is the focus on how do we actually have an impact at that direct customer level and, and how are we driving revenue and, and, and real business outcomes.

2:28
And so that leads us into what we’ll cover today.

2:30
I think, you know, we’ve got 6 areas we want to cover as we go through this.

2:34
You know, first we’re gonna just talk about where traditional CX programs tend to fail and why they don’t actually have the impact that that people are looking for.

2:44
The second is in B to C, you know, a lot of us as consumers have our own experiences and sometimes we apply those to how we think AB to B organization should work.

2:54
And that’s actually one of the areas where organizations fail today.

2:58
And so we’re gonna talk about what are some of the specific things the B to B organizations need to focus on across the personas journeys and the gap that predicts churn.

3:08
Next we’ll talk about how to identify key driver analysis.

3:12
And Eric, I think you know, you and I have talked about this Monday morning concept, right?

3:16
When when I come to work on Monday morning, what are the key things that I need to go and execute and work on?

3:21
We’ll talk a little bit about if you set your program up correctly and you’ve prioritize the right areas, you know exactly what to focus on you and your teams every single week.

3:30
And then we’ll get into our cheat code, right?

3:33
And that’s really how do we embed this into an organization so that we’re impacting both the macro as well as the microeconomics of, of our customer base and how we’re engaging with them.

3:43
And then we’ll walk through a little bit of a program of, of what, of what the final output looks like for a customer and how they can use, you know, Alcamer’s underlying technology and the expertise of the Vista XM team and their years of experience and how those two together drive real outcomes.

4:02
And then we’ll talk about the data and, and how that’s used to prove, prove this out and, and get your programs up and running.

4:10
So Eric, talk to me a little bit about why traditional CX programs fail in driving, in driving revenue.

4:19
Yeah.

4:20
And you know, having been in the space a long time, I was I fell into that trap early.

4:25
You know, we were really big on, hey, let’s go get a calculator NPS score, let’s go calculate ACSAP.

4:31
Let’s go talk to customers and get this this feedback and and let’s be very proud of that score.

4:36
We used to joke about, hey, let’s frame it and put it on the wall.

4:38
And and that was great.

4:40
I mean, it was it was good to kind of get a a feeling for the sentiment.

4:43
But at the end of the day, right, when you looked at how do businesses take that number, take that value and do do something with it, that’s where the gap existed.

4:52
It was really hard to translate that, that NPS score into real actionable revenue opportunities.

4:59
And so it really did not move the revenue.

5:02
And a couple of reasons why I wonder NPS was never really designed for that.

5:06
It really wasn’t built for that.

5:08
That’s not what NPS does.

5:10
And a lot of times we don’t even bring in the revenue side of the equation when we’re doing this type of work.

5:15
The other problem was sometimes, you know, when you do these surveys, you get a lot of open comments and you get a lot of feedback and it almost gives you too much.

5:24
And so we would see a lot of cases where your customers would get all this great feedback and they’d summarize it and they’d come up with 100 different things that they needed to go do.

5:32
And they’d flip those over the fence to the the business units or the teams and say, hey, call center, you’ve got to go improve this or sales OPS, we need some improvement here.

5:43
And these people would take that insight or that that piece of knowledge and say, that’s great.

5:46
I’ll put it on the list with the 20 other things I’m chartered with doing this quarter of this year.

5:50
And a lot of times we just didn’t take action.

5:53
Things just didn’t happen.

5:54
It was just overload and it was just more noise in the system.

5:57
So the end of the year, we look back and say what we really accomplished well or we have an MPs score, but that wasn’t good enough and, and ultimately that didn’t move revenue.

6:07
And so, you know, ultimately when you think about the funding for these programs and executives getting excited about these programs, it’s the revenue that drives that.

6:16
It’s not the the the NPS score.

6:19
It’s say, show me how this is improving my customer base, how it’s expanding customers, how it’s helping me retain customers.

6:25
And ultimately that’s what matters.

6:27
Yeah.

6:29
So maybe tell me where organizations typically fail specifically B to B organizations when they go and stand up their programs and and kind of what you talked about, right, moving beyond just a score.

6:41
Yeah.

6:42
And you know, when you think about NPS initially, it was built really for the B to C model.

6:48
And So what what typically happens if you think about yourself as a, let’s say an iPhone purchaser, you’re the decision maker.

6:54
You decide the model to purchase, you configure it, you set it up, you manage it, you support it.

7:01
It’s you, you’re one, you’re one person 1 persona and you do handle all of the different let’s get journey phases with that, with that purchase.

7:11
And so when I ask an NPS question to an iPhone buyer, I’m saying you think about all those interactions you’ve had with Apple over the course of between purchasing and supporting and maintaining and refreshing and buying the new one and tell me what you think.

7:24
And that works really well in the B to C world.

7:27
The breakdown is when we try to take that model and apply it into the B to B space where that journey may influence 5 or be influenced by 56789 different personas.

7:39
So there are multiple personas that are really driving that influence in every single account that we deal with.

7:46
And this is not a, hey, I’m, I’m going out and buying a, a Starbucks coffee and you’re going to send me a survey.

7:52
How was, how was your, your Starbucks experience?

7:55
But these are relationships in the B2B world that last a long time.

7:59
I mean we, we have customers today who’s their end customers have been with them for 20 years.

8:05
And so these are long term relationships spanning multiple personas, changing personas overtime.

8:12
And so you think about the renewal cycles, the the upsell, the cross sell opportunities that, you know, traditional NPS was really never meant to, to judge that and, and measure that.

8:24
And so that’s really the, the breakdown in the difference.

8:26
So with our business within this XM, we only focus on B to B.

8:30
That’s that’s where we focus.

8:31
So we’ve had to address that very differently and think differently about how we’re listening for B to B and within the B to B realm and change the model quite a bit.

8:42
It’s not, you know, NPS alone just doesn’t give us what we need.

8:46
And instead, now we’ve got to think differently in the B2B world because it is a very different buyer, different market, different persona, different customer journey.

8:54
It’s just very different than what we’ve seen in the in the BTC world.

8:59
Great.

8:59
So maybe let’s let’s walk through how you actually then go about turning this into a reality.

9:05
Yeah.

9:06
So the big shift that we have made as we think about revenue intelligence and we call it revenue intelligence very deliberately sort of moving away from traditional customer experience.

9:16
Because again, if you’re AAB to B buyer, you’re the customer isn’t one person.

9:22
The customer is 10s hundreds of people, in some cases maybe even thousands.

9:27
So we’re always thinking about it in terms of how do we get the intelligence to improve revenue in, in that B to B space.

9:34
And so where we start is really understanding what that journey looks like and you know, typical model.

9:41
It doesn’t have to be super complex.

9:42
I know there was a big push a few years ago and Brandon, you probably remember this.

9:46
Everybody was doing journey maps.

9:47
That was the big thing and everybody loved their journey maps and they’d spend weeks or months building these things.

9:54
In reality, what we see, it doesn’t need to be that sophisticated, just really understand what are the major stages of, of whether it’s purchase and then on board, adopt, renew, expand.

10:05
However your company maps that really understand that, that true journey.

10:10
And it again, doesn’t have to be super sophisticated, but you’ve got to know what those critical steps are because the next step is really understanding the personas that are active in each stage of the journey.

10:20
And if you think about it almost as a A matrix, you’ve got the journey across the top and you’ve got the personas along the side.

10:27
And each one of those of those points within that matrix can tell you something unique about the overall experience you’re delivering in the B to B world.

10:37
So again, thinking of those personas, who’s responsible for onboarding, who’s it responsible for renewal?

10:43
Who is engaged in the adoption phase or the expansion phase?

10:47
And a lot of times, especially in B to B, and this is very different from the B to C world where it’s one person, you may have 5 or 6, seven different personas.

10:55
And even within a persona, you may have 5 or 6 different people that you need to be listening to.

11:01
And so that’s really, you know, a massive shift that you have to make is think about the journey, think about the persona and start to bring that all together in terms of deriving a signal.

11:12
Because if you’re going to get to revenue intelligence and really understand what’s driving revenue, you’ve got to understand where in the journey things might be failing and which personas you might be falling short.

11:22
So our customers are typically, you know, what we’ll tell them is that you’ve got a problem, for example, in in the sales space, right?

11:28
Your customers don’t like how you sell to them or you, they don’t like how you manage the day-to-day support.

11:35
We might also find that, hey, you’ve lost executive trust or the procurement director does not like working with you.

11:43
And so it, it can exist problems and friction can exist in the the journey and it can exist in the persona.

11:50
And so that’s why it’s really important in the B2B world that we’re thinking about gathering signal across that matrix.

11:56
Yeah.

11:56
And I’ll say, you know, being in the B2B industry, right, as a SAS company, you know, a couple of things that we’ve done when you talk about this signal is we actually, it’s funny you mentioned we actually run a win loss survey.

12:09
So we start listening to Signal to understand when we lose, what are the key reasons why so that we can start doing a lot less of that.

12:16
And then where are we winning and start doing a lot more of that.

12:20
But as you mentioned, it’s very different the feedback we get depending on the person, right?

12:24
Was this an end user who is involved, involved in the cycle or is this the economic buyer or ultimately the, the executive sponsor?

12:32
And what was their experience and how did we deliver versus what their expectations were?

12:37
And understanding that gap allows us then to actually mold from onboarding all the way through expansion to understand where, where could we find potential risks.

12:47
So I I love that idea.

12:48
So maybe talk to us a little bit about what we could versus should do in that Monday morning.

12:54
Yeah, this is and, and like I said, I, when I was doing, doing this work practitioner, this is a common trap.

13:00
And I fell into this because, you know, when you start to run these programs, you start to gather a lot of data.

13:06
And you know, sometimes it may just be 1 customer who says, you know, I don’t like the colour of your background in your SAS platform or something as simple as that.

13:16
And automatically we just want to go solve that.

13:19
And we think, oh, this is something I need to, I got to flip this over to my product team and let’s get to work on that because that, that’s a problem.

13:25
And then you get another comment.

13:26
Well, I don’t like the font choice.

13:28
OK, well, let’s get to our web team and let’s fix that.

13:31
And so it’s, it’s so easy to start to, to absorb and bring it all of these interesting insights and you just want to go fix all this stuff.

13:39
But the reality is when we studied the, the industry leading programs and who does this the best in the world, and this is the Adobe’s and the apples and the AWS is in the, the kin drools and you know, the, the companies, everybody knows and the brands that everybody respects.

13:55
What we learned was that it’s not about what I I could do, but what I should do.

14:01
And so the prioritization of those actions is absolutely critical.

14:06
And we use a process we call ease an impact.

14:09
And so when you get all of these opportunities and all of these insights coming in, you’ve got to evaluate them relative to each other.

14:15
And you think about them in terms of one, how easy is it to go and do, is it I got to go put in a new ERP system complex or is it something as simple as I just need to change the background on my website, right?

14:27
That’s something I can do in 24 hours.

14:30
And the other side of that, and this is where we start to really focus on the revenue side is what’s the impact?

14:35
How many customers are impacted?

14:37
How much potential revenue am I losing?

14:39
How many, how much churn could just be driving in my business?

14:43
And you have to be able to quantify that in terms of what’s the overall business impact.

14:47
And the nice thing is it doesn’t have to be exact.

14:50
We tend to use a, you know, score from maybe 1:00 to 5:00 to evaluate this because you’re really trying to get a directional feel for of the 100 things we could do, what are the ones that really stand out from an ease and impact?

15:03
We want to do easy things to drive the biggest impact.

15:05
That’s the, that’s the short answer.

15:07
Go find the easy things, go fix them and drive the biggest impact, and then take the next easiest ones and the next easiest ones.

15:12
Don’t try to do too much, but that’s how we think about prioritization.

15:16
That is an absolutely critical step.

15:18
Again, if you look at the world’s best customer experience programs, that’s what they’re doing today.

15:23
They are not trying to go fix 100 things or 1000 things.

15:26
They’re fixing one or two.

15:28
They’re getting it right, and then they’re moving on to the next ones.

15:31
And that’s really, really a critical step that a lot of lot of companies miss.

15:34
I missed it when I was running these programs.

15:37
I see our customers make this mistake all the time and we’re helping correct that.

15:40
But something everybody needs to keep in mind, don’t try to do too much.

15:44
You don’t have to.

15:46
8020 rule definitely applies.

15:48
Prioritize those 20% of actions that are going to drive 80% of the value.

15:51
Yeah, I really like that.

15:53
I think one of the things I’d love to have you tell us about, maybe it’s on this next slide, but a lot of times I, I see our customers and probably a lot of people who are on this webinar today where they’ve said, hey, Eric, we’ve done a lot of the prioritization, but now we’re at the point where we’re not sure who should own this or which team is actually going to be involved.

16:12
So maybe talk to us how you take this from signal to action.

16:15
Yeah, this is and, and Brandon, I know when we’ve worked together, we saw this all the time.

16:21
This is a very, very common problem, right?

16:24
And it’s, it’s really hard.

16:25
And you know, some of it is structural, right?

16:27
You, you have ACX team, for example, that sits adjacent to an OPS team or a marketing team or a sales team.

16:34
Sometimes they don’t have a seat at the table.

16:36
They’re too far down in the organization.

16:38
So it’s tough to have that influence.

16:40
But the tricks we have seen is one of the things that has to be done if you’re going to get that team to take an action, for example, is to be able to build that case and build a strong business case that this is an action worth taking.

16:56
And a lot of times we see again that if people say, hey, it’d be really nice if we did XY and Z.

17:02
Well, again, if I’m a business process owner, I’ve got 12 other priorities that that are on my plate today.

17:09
It’s not like I’m sitting here waiting for the CX team to come and tell me what to do.

17:13
So it gets gets stacked into that list and I’ll get to it when I get to it.

17:17
And So what we like to do, you know, we talked about this, this this signal to action is, you know, making sure that we’re tying it all to revenue dot coms.

17:26
We can call that the business case revenue outcomes, however you want to do it.

17:29
But really do that, that level of of correlation to say, hey, look, this metric is impacting X or it’s impacting Y.

17:37
And I’ll give you a really simple example.

17:39
We had a customer that last year when they were doing it themselves, they came up with an NPS score.

17:45
That was their thing.

17:45
And they say, hey, we got a problem or NPS score dropped 4 points.

17:49
And so again, what do you do with that?

17:51
What, what’s the outcome?

17:52
How do you handle that?

17:53
It wasn’t enough.

17:54
When we ran a revenue intelligence program, we were able to come back and say you have a problem with your SMB accounts in your Midwest region because of the friction in the renewal process.

18:05
And if you don’t fix that, 12% of your renewals next year are at risk.

18:10
So you think about that versus our NPS score dropped four points, right?

18:13
That is something.

18:14
Now I’ve correlated it to a revenue outcome.

18:16
I can see the impact of not solving for that problem.

18:20
And once you phrase it that way, that’s going to get the attention of the sales OPS organization or a selling organization because, OK, I’ve got revenue at risk next year because of this.

18:32
And so that wasn’t the only insight we found.

18:34
And, and you know, you end up with multiple insights, you’ve got to be able to rank them by significance, not just the volume of comments or who the comments come from.

18:43
A lot of times we put all the weight on the biggest customer who screams the loudest and we ignore everybody else, which is really unfortunate.

18:50
But it’s, it’s really about the, the, the weights of those drivers.

18:55
And you have to do the, the, the work here.

18:56
You have to do the statistical analysis.

18:59
From there, you’re able to do that prioritization that I talked about.

19:02
Again, it ease an impact is the model that makes it it really easy and then flag them what matters, right?

19:10
What are the high driver, low, low performance accounts in this case?

19:14
Maybe that’s what we’re looking for really trying to figure out, hey, do I got a process issue in the outer loop?

19:19
Or maybe it’s a set of accounts that I need to go call Monday morning because these are at risk accounts or these are accounts that are up for renewal in the next three months and I need a tiger team here.

19:30
I need a task force.

19:32
We’ve got to go address this because we got 12% of these at risk next year and we’re going to go talk to every one of those accounts and make sure that we’re going to get a renewal.

19:40
And so we can, we can flag those.

19:42
When you start to flag it at at that level with that detail, that’s how the action starts to happen.

19:48
It’s very easy for our customers to to get actions to happen when they phrase it that way and when they have that level of detail.

19:57
Great.

19:57
So I think that’s, that’s where you actually talk about putting this, embedding it and making it a part of your, the DNA of your organization.

20:04
Yeah, this is the magic.

20:07
So this is our secret sauce and you know, we’ll share it here.

20:11
This is what makes it work.

20:13
You know, traditionally we’ve always done, hey, we’re going to go do an NPS survey.

20:16
Maybe we do it once a year and then we come back with a bunch of insights and then a year later we do it again.

20:21
And and that’s again, I did it.

20:23
A lot of people do it that way.

20:25
A lot of our customers have done it that way.

20:26
Maybe they do it twice a year.

20:28
OK, that works.

20:30
But what really works is what we call workflow embedded, where I can take the data and the insights I’m developing today and I can give them to a team to make a decision tomorrow.

20:41
And so that really changes completely how CX and CX teams and programs are viewed within an organization.

20:49
And I’ll give you an example on the inner loop side.

20:52
Which accounts do we need to call?

20:54
Which ones do we need to assign a new AE on?

20:57
Which ones do we need to put more field support or dedicated customer success Rep?

21:01
I’m making those decisions every day, right?

21:03
If I’m in the sales organization, I decide how to allocate those resources.

21:07
Every day.

21:08
I have another piece of data to help me make those decisions.

21:11
Or maybe before I was doing it on gut field.

21:13
Now I’m doing it in with objective data that I didn’t have before.

21:17
I’m making a much better, much smarter decision.

21:20
And what we find is when our customers start using this day-to-day to day, they never turn it off, they want more.

21:26
And so ultimately CX programs are expanding in, in our customers because they’re using this data everyday.

21:33
And then the, the teams come back and say, can you tell me this?

21:35
Because I’m trying to make this decision.

21:37
I don’t have the data I need.

21:39
We’re doing a spray and pray.

21:40
We don’t know how to, to address that.

21:43
Likewise on the outer loop side, So we think more about the system view and the system improvements that we need to make.

21:50
You know, what processes do we need to modernize?

21:53
Do I modernize process A or process B?

21:56
Do I need to make some tweaks in this process as I make investment decisions for next quarter?

22:01
Where am I going to double down?

22:03
Do I have to go fix that online ordering because it’s a, it’s a mess, or do I need to go fix my, my customer success coverage?

22:10
I need to bring in more CS reps because we’re hearing that we don’t have enough field support.

22:15
And so again, decisions that are made on a daily basis when you can embed CX data into that decision making process, these the exponential value of ACX program just takes off.

22:28
And you know, if you want to, if you want to drive really successful high value programs in an organization, figure out how to get this data embedded, you’ve got to collect the right data.

22:39
Again, NPS doesn’t always do it.

22:40
You’ve got to be thinking about personas and understanding the process.

22:43
And because you’re addressing it a persona journey stage level, you’re getting the information in the data you need that then can be embedded into these programs.

22:51
And when you can turn that on these programs, I don’t know if they stay funded, but they get increased funding because all of a sudden this is board level stuff.

23:00
This is this is CEO level stuff.

23:03
And this is something that you know, people can’t get enough of in our experience.

23:07
And that’s what really turns these programs into something extremely valuable.

23:12
Yeah, I think where we see the most successful companies, it’s when this becomes just a part of their everyday work.

23:18
Meaning I this isn’t a separate program.

23:21
This isn’t a separate set of data.

23:22
It’s embedded into the systems I work in everyday.

23:25
It’s embedded into my workflows and it’s really embedded into the culture of the organization, right?

23:30
The one I’m on boarded and I am and I go through my enablement.

23:34
I’m learning about how do we put the customer at the center of everything that we do?

23:38
And how are we constantly evolving as an organization to see and listen to those signals that you talked about and then acting on those and making that just part of that continuous improvement as you mentioned.

23:50
So this is great stuff, Eric.

23:51
I think, you know, there’s probably a lot of people like myself who are saying, well, that’s great.

23:55
I’m at different points in that journey, you know, from a sophistication of program, but what does this actually look like in a real world application?

24:03
So maybe you can walk us through and and talk to us about that.

24:06
So you want to set the stage for the next few slides?

24:08
Yeah.

24:09
So what I’ve done on the on these next few slides is I took what we delivered to our customers and I’ve anonymized it.

24:16
You know, we, we’ve got to change all the names, but the data, the results, what you’re going to see on the next slide, this is what our customers get.

24:23
And so this is, we talked about a leading program and, and I’ll tell you full transparency, our methodology and our program is very similar to some of those industry leaders that I mentioned because I worked with them in the past.

24:38
So I was able to kind of hate to say plagiarize.

24:40
I don’t know what the right word is, but you know, look, there was no one, no reason to reinvent the wheel when it comes to creating the world’s best program.

24:47
Just learn from the world’s best and that’s what I did.

24:50
So we took that we built this playbook and so our customers are getting this type of result.

24:56
And so regardless of where you are on your maturity curve, you know, I always like the Stephen Covey, right?

25:01
Think with the about the end in mind, right?

25:03
Where are you trying to get to?

25:05
So imagine if your program was was providing this type of insight and data back.

25:10
And this is just a very simple example of the types of stuff that a great program can deliver back.

25:17
But it’s it’s things that, you know, you guys, anybody who is building a program like this can be, can be thinking about in terms of how where do we want to get to and where can we drive more value out of our program.

25:29
Great.

25:29
So let’s jump in and see what the data would tell us.

25:33
Yeah.

25:33
So, you know, think about a simple question.

25:35
We talked about that, that, you know, that whole workflow embedded, you know, something is simple.

25:41
We have one customer who they like to assign executive sponsors.

25:44
And this is very common and we see this a lot.

25:47
They want to put executive sponsors on, on the accounts that that matter.

25:51
So one of the questions was, how do we know which accounts we should assign an executive sponsor to?

25:57
And so one of the things you’re able to do with a program like this, if you’re looking at it at a persona level as well as that journey level, one of the things we can surface is what’s the gap between the decision maker and the champion or the influencer within an account?

26:13
And this from our data, this is something we’re seeing is extremely significant.

26:19
And you in a traditional NPS program, you can’t see this because you’re typically just asking the decision maker, hey, what do you think?

26:24
Are you likely to recommend us to a friend or colleague?

26:27
But when you start to ask across all of those champions of all of those other personas that are touching your brand, across all of those different journey stages, what starts to emerge is, hey, we’ve got a gap.

26:37
We have a gap between our decision makers, the executives that we love to work with and then all of these champions who are touching our brand, but maybe we don’t talk to or we don’t know much about.

26:46
And when we see that gap increase and in this particular customers, a 20 point gap, it reduced their service attach rate.

26:54
So they were, they were selling fewer services into these accounts.

26:57
Most of their accounts, a lot of their accounts have gone stagnant.

27:00
They were not able to grow those accounts.

27:02
They weren’t able to take share from competitors.

27:04
And so we were able to isolate that and really understand that, hey, there was a gap here in the decision maker to champions and that gap because decision makers make the decisions, but champions are quietly influencing that by behind the seats.

27:19
And so the the program was we’re going to address that.

27:22
We’re going to sign executive sponsors, they’re going to meet with those champions, they’re going to spend time with those champions.

27:28
When we go have these meetings and QBRS, we’re going to pull them in, we’re going to engage them.

27:32
And so we were able to understand which accounts have that gap.

27:35
We were able to help that customer sign those executive sponsors.

27:38
I mean, this is something we’re doing all the time.

27:40
All of a sudden, we saw that gap close.

27:42
We saw average spend per customer go up and just that bit of insight, you’ve literally paid for the whole program for the next 10 years, just that one alone.

27:52
So very, very significant.

27:53
But that’s how you can use this type of data, this type of understanding if you’re doing it in a revenue intelligence level and make a help that influence of decisions, something as mundane as even we assign an executive sponsor to, I can tell you exactly who to, who to assign it to.

28:07
And when we did that, we saw the results come out of the other end and they are very, very significant.

28:14
One of the things we see all the time, very, very common is, you know, look, we, we know who our, our, you know, promoter accounts are.

28:22
We know who our passive accounts are and we know who our detractors accounts are.

28:27
What we generally don’t know is how much more does a promoter spend than a passive on active on average, and how much does a passive spend over a detractor on average?

28:36
And if you knew that and if you were able to quantify that, and by the way, in our business, we see it somewhere between 3:00 and 8:00, times more if you’re a promoter versus a passive, and two to three times more if you’re a passive over a detractor.

28:48
So you start thinking about it, but wait a minute, what if we move some of those passives into promoters?

28:52
Will they spend more with us?

28:53
Yes, they will.

28:54
But you’ve got to understand why they’re not promoters.

28:57
Why are they still passives?

28:59
And if you’ve got a lot of accounts that keep buying the same from you every single year and you can’t expand, you’re not taking share from your competitors and you wonder why it focus on these passive accounts.

29:07
So we think about, OK, what type of data can I use on Monday morning?

29:12
Here’s a list, right here is a list of passive accounts we need to talk to right now because if we can turn the any one of these accounts into a promoter, they’re going to go from spending X to spending up to 8X more than they’re spending today.

29:27
And you look at, again, these are real numbers.

29:29
These are real accounts in the B to B world.

29:30
This is what we typically deal with.

29:32
You know, we deal with a lot fewer customers, but a lot larger.

29:35
Just promoting one of these into the promoter camp is very, very significant.

29:40
So a well run program, you’re capturing this in an account level, you’re understanding which one should we be calling?

29:47
Because you’ve got the, the the revenue side of this.

29:51
Hey, let’s go figure out how we take this handful of accounts and move them to promoters, because if even one of them increases their spend, it’s paid for the whole program again, 1015 times over.

30:01
These are top and bottom line impacts of the business that can be really significant.

30:05
Yeah.

30:06
So let’s talk about those detractors.

30:08
Yeah, look, detractors are the high risk accounts.

30:10
These are the ones that are most likely to turn out.

30:12
They tend to spend the the least amount.

30:15
And so in this particular customer, right, they wanted to know what can we do?

30:19
We’re going to put more customer support on these detractor accounts.

30:22
Now it it wasn’t a coincidence that we said more customers for when we looked at what those customers were complaining about, it was we don’t hear enough from you.

30:30
We don’t have enough support.

30:31
We can’t get the platform to work.

30:33
We’re not getting the adoption right.

30:34
All of those things that are kind of aligned to, to lack of a good customer support program.

30:39
So again, this customer’s trying to make a decision where do we double down in, in CS?

30:43
How do we put, how do we identify accounts we need to increase our customer support or maybe taking our, our top CS reps and engage them on these accounts.

30:52
Here’s the list.

30:53
These are the ones that matter the most.

30:55
And again, it’s broken out by by revenue.

30:57
So the whole impact side, if you’re going to make a, a big impact here, go focus on those accounts.

31:03
And this is an account by account list.

31:05
And this is a decision.

31:06
These are decisions you make every day.

31:08
This is not a, and we got a low NPS score with these guys.

31:11
Who cares, right?

31:12
What I know is I got to put more customer support people on it.

31:16
I need to have them talking to these accounts.

31:18
One, we want to save them, and two, if I can move them into the promoter camp or at least the passive camp, I can get a 2X increase in what they’re spending with us.

31:26
So one, there’s value in saving them and preventing them from churning out.

31:29
And two, there’s real value in if I can get them to like me a little bit more because I can solve for some of the friction pain points here, I bet I can get more business from these accounts.

31:39
And that becomes a growth lever to growth driver.

31:41
And so again, this is what you do Monday morning, you pick up the phone, you call these accounts, you assign a customer success Rep, they get engaged with these accounts.

31:50
This is that real workflow embedded action in here and a good revenue intelligence program, This is what it can deliver for you.

31:59
Yeah, that’s fantastic.

32:01
So let’s talk a little about those outcomes and what you saw.

32:04
Yeah, we’re able to go back and we, this is one of our our longer term customers.

32:08
But you know, when you look at then the revenue impact of of these actions, you know, closing that decision maker to champion Gap, you know, addressing the detractors and improving the spend.

32:20
And that’s exactly what happened.

32:22
They, they found out, you know, what, what those detractors were doing, moving them into the passive camp, retaining them as customers, you know, assigning the CSMS to the right accounts, not just spray and pray and blanket them and go hire more CSMS, but targeting specific accounts, you know, understanding accounts maybe where we didn’t have data or we didn’t have the personas.

32:43
And really going after that and addressing that.

32:46
When you look at the impact then that this program had on this account, it’s significant.

32:52
And we were able to really quantify this working with the finance team.

32:56
And so finance team came back and said, yeah, look, we, we’ve seen this, we, we, we’ve seen this impact.

33:01
And when you can make a business case like this.

33:04
And back to my earlier comments about, you know, how do you, how do you get executives and how do you get the board and, and the, the leaders of an organization really excited about ACX program.

33:16
This is the slide you need, right?

33:18
This is what you put up and say, yeah, this isn’t soft.

33:21
These are hard quantified business benefits that were obtained.

33:26
And if you want a program to to get more investment and to expand a program to be able to do more, you have to take those decisions and translate them into dollars.

33:35
And ultimately, you know, this is how you need to be thinking about it.

33:40
Great.

33:40
Why don’t you wrap this up?

33:45
Yeah.

33:45
And so you think about the, you know what it requires.

33:49
I mentioned early on, right, the persona and the journey stage listening.

33:52
You can’t just send blanket surveys into everybody or not knowing who the persona is.

33:58
And by the way, there’s, there’s tricks you can do.

34:00
If you don’t know the persona, you can find out who they are.

34:03
There’s a lot of things you can do.

34:04
We work with a lot of customers, help identify that, understand it at the persona level, understand at the journey stage.

34:10
That intersection point gives you the insights you need for Part 2, which is the structure analysis.

34:16
You’ve got to be able to do that analysis, understand your key drivers, do ease and impact, focus on the right things, make that workflow embedded because that’s the magic.

34:25
When you can do that, you generate those big returns for the business.

34:29
And ultimately you’ve got to have the infrastructure.

34:32
We like say you got to have people, process and technology.

34:34
You have to have a technology solution that allows you to gather that data and, and really, you know, bring those data points in.

34:43
It’s got to be robust enough and flexible enough that allows you to capture the data in a way that’s meaningful.

34:48
And so, you know, this is where the Elkamer platform, you know it, the whole methodology runs on top of that.

34:55
And so you you’ve got the data, you got the collection.

34:58
Now you can start to do the listening and journey stage listening and then you can start to do the analysis and you can get to all of that, that high value activity that you need to do again on on top of the infrastructure.

35:09
Yeah, I love this idea of understanding who we need to talk to.

35:14
How do we ask the right questions and how do we standardize on a single platform that allows us to get all of that, that insight?

35:22
And then like you talked about, I think you know profits a must have.

35:26
I think in your example you saw a 2000% ROI.

35:29
Is that right?

35:29
Is that, is there a typo in that?

35:31
No, no, in fact, you know, again you, you look at the, the relative cost of a program versus you know what, what’s it worth if you save a $6 million ARR account that would have turned out right, it’s worth $6 million a year against maybe a six figure all in program cost.

35:48
You do that with two or three accounts.

35:50
This is a light number.

35:52
And so that’s that’s not uncommon.

35:54
That’s what we’re seeing especially in some of our bigger customers where some of their customers again, it’s not uncommon to have a five, ten, $15 million a year ARR customer.

36:02
We found customers that were on the verge of churning out that our customers didn’t even know.

36:06
And so you you find those are able to retain a handful of those accounts.

36:10
They just saved 202530 million of ARR this year.

36:14
These ROI numbers can be liked and the most important thing here, and it’s the point at the bottom, Brandon, is if if you want to shift CX from a nice to have program to a must have program, this is the number, right?

36:27
This is how you do it.

36:29
And so when you can can demonstrate the value across those actions that you’re taking, you can show you save customers or expanded customers.

36:36
You roll up the numbers here.

36:37
This is a must have program, right?

36:39
This is something that gets funded every year and funding increases and and invest executives want to invest in because this is must have status at this point.

36:47
Yeah, no, that’s great.

36:50
Well, Eric, this has been very, very insightful for me and I’m sure for many people who are listening.

36:56
At the beginning, we asked folks to submit questions through the chat.

37:00
You know, obviously there’s AQR code.

37:02
We’d love to get your feedback on the webinar today or if you’d like additional information from either Outcome or for Vista XM, you know, please respond and and let us know.

37:11
I’ll take just a second.

37:12
It looks like there’s a couple of questions coming in, Eric, so let me see.

37:18
So hey, Eric, here’s here’s a question that’s coming in from someone in the audience.

37:23
It says we’re getting very low response rates, you know, less than 5%.

37:28
What do you recommend we do?

37:29
Will that make it hard for us to get the types of insights that you’re talking about?

37:34
Yeah.

37:34
And, and you know, response rates, unfortunately that’s kind of a holdover from B to C We don’t care as much about response rates per SE in the, in the B to B world.

37:45
What really matters are one, are you getting responses from the right personas?

37:50
And two, are you getting responses from a percentage of your revenue that’s significant.

37:55
So we typically see, you know, 50, sixty, 70% of revenue being covered by the responses.

38:03
And so when we think about response rates, it’s, it’s really hard, you know, to say, well, 5% is good or bad.

38:09
Sometimes it could be good.

38:11
We have one customer, for example, that one of their customers, they had 1800 contacts, customer contacts.

38:17
So of course we reached out to all 1800.

38:19
We heard from the six that we needed to hear from response rates less than a percent.

38:24
And you say, oh, that’s terrible response rates.

38:25
Actually it was an excellent response rate.

38:27
So response rates matter more in the B to C realm than they do in B to B.

38:33
It’s more important to get the right responses and make sure you have enough revenue covered.

38:37
I’ll also add that our research has shown that especially in B to B, it’s not that people don’t want to respond to surveys.

38:45
The problem is they don’t want to waste time and so it there’s a a lot of little things you need to be doing to make sure people are willing to take the time.

38:54
It’s one thing to say I’m not going to fill out a survey because I bought a $5 cup of coffee.

38:58
It’s not worth my time.

38:59
But if I’m AB to B customer and I’ve spent $100,000 with your firm and, and I might have put my career on the line or a, prevent potential promotion because I, I bought from you and recommended you as a, a vendor, you better believe I’m going to spend 4 minutes to fill out a survey.

39:15
But what’s really important is that that person who’s filling out knows that you’re listening, that you’ve heard them and that they’re going to see something different happen from that.

39:23
So one of the things we love to do on share best practice here is when we close out a survey, we write the, the e-mail that ACEO sends out to everybody, whether they participated in the survey or not, to say thank you for taking the time.

39:34
Here’s what we heard, right?

39:36
Here’s sort of the general themes that we heard.

39:37
But more importantly, here’s what you’re going to see differently from us over the next six months.

39:42
These are the two or three things we’re going to do to address your concerns.

39:46
And we do that.

39:47
What we find is the people who didn’t submit a survey the first time to actually respond back and say, is it too late?

39:52
You know, I’d love to be able to respond.

39:53
And the next time we do it, we hear more and more feedback and customers are may are willing to take more and more time to provide it because they know it’s not a waste of time that you as an organization are listening and that they can expect to see something as a result.

40:06
So that’s one of those little best practices.

40:08
I think it’s still up for McDermott service now, but one of those little things you can do that will.

40:12
Will completely change how your customers think about you sending a survey and asking for feedback.

40:18
Yeah, that’s fantastic.

40:19
Is that going back to that concept you mentioned earlier, right.

40:22
Embedding it into the workflows and the journeys and then actually showing your customers you’re listening and taking action.

40:29
So.

40:29
So that’s great.

40:31
We’ve got one other question here.

40:32
It says one of the things we’ve struggled with in the past for these types of initiatives is getting executive buy in and support.

40:41
What do you suggest for getting our executives to buy in on a program like this?

40:45
Yeah.

40:45
And and you know, I love this question and I think it goes to a lot of what we’ve talked about over the last, you know, 4045 minutes, which is you’ve got to tie it to revenue.

40:54
You know, executives are focused on revenue, they’re focused on growth, they’re focused on churn and reducing churn in the business.

41:02
They’re focused on customer expansion.

41:04
And so when you start to speak that language, it very quickly becomes something that they’re going to buy into because you know, every other function in business is aligned to that, whether that’s marketing, sales, delivery, support.

41:19
It’s all about how do I keep customers happy, how do I keep them coming back?

41:22
How do I drive adoption and feature adoption within my within my solutions?

41:27
And so when you start to speak that language, now you’re at the table with these other business functions.

41:32
And that’s probably the most important thing to do.

41:35
So start thinking about this as revenue intelligence.

41:38
You know, in some cases you may want to rebrand your team.

41:40
Maybe it’s not the CX team anymore, maybe it is the revenue intelligence team.

41:45
You know, start thinking about it in terms of how do I translate?

41:49
You know, a survey result from MPs is going to drop 4 points to I got a problem with SMB customers in the Midwest region because of renewal friction.

41:58
And if I don’t solve that friction problem, I’m going to put X percent of renewals at risk.

42:02
Think of it that way, articulate it that way, talk to executives that way.

42:07
And when you make that shift and you start to think of it that way, you will the executives will just gravitate to this.

42:15
That’s great.

42:16
Well, again, thank you, Eric for for carving some time out today to talk to us about this.

42:20
And thank you to each of you who decided to join us and take a little time out of your day to listen to these insights about how to really impact revenue and B to B organizations.

42:29
So thank you for joining us and we’ll catch you on the next webinar.

42:32
You bet Thank you, Brandon.

42:33
Thanks.