B2B Benchmarks Series - Account Sentiment

If you're just looking at NPS by itself as a standalone, here's a company running a mid-80s NPS, you would think they're good. We have nothing to worry about. But your key stakeholder here, your key decision maker in signing that check. And that renewal is a detractor. So you got to look past that benchmark. So when your boss says, how's our score compared to other departments or other companies? You gotta be a little more dynamic with your score a little bit. Dive in a little bit deeper.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience Podcast. And we're gonna switch things up a little bit. We've received a lot of feedback from you all requesting a few B2B benchmarks. And guess what? You're in luck. Today we're kicking off a new mini series on B2B experience benchmarks with our yet to be released benchmarks data consisting over a thousand responses from B2B companies of all shapes and sizes across the globe. In this first episode, we cover account sentiment. More specifically, measuring how many contacts per account you should have to get account sentiment. So without further ado, let's kick off the first episode in the series. Enjoy. I'm here as always with my co host, Carrie T. Self.

Hello, everyone.

And today, guys, we're going to go into some benchmarks. So I know everybody and their mother loves a good benchmark and we're kind of. We straddle the line between benchmarks are good and benchmarks are bad, but yet there is still a demand in the market. So we want to try to provide some clarity with our benchmarks report, which we launch, I think, every other year. So we don't do it all the time, but we do try to get enough data, so it's pretty compelling results. And I'm happy to say that we're over a thousand responses on our latest data set and we wanted to kind of give a sneak peek of what the benchmarks report would look like. So, Kerry, what are your thoughts on benchmarks? Just to kick it off.

Taking the side of bad. No, no, no. You know, I think benchmarking can be a powerful tool. I think we were joking around earlier that, you know, I found customer gauge many years ago as a customer through the benchmarks, because, you know, I had a. I had a leadership group who wanted to know how they stood and how they performed with other people in the industry. So I think this is the first kind of. I'll keep it really vague, but benchmarking can be challenging with certain data Sets and certain metrics. There's so many variables that go into something like an NPS score, for example, Net Promoter. You know how the question's asked, who's asked how often, there's so many variables. What type of business is it that could throw a number off like that? But I think there's other great benchmarking data. So I have to say what we're going to talk about today, I'm really excited about because I would say it comes from the good category of benchmarking.

Yeah, I'm with you. And I think there are some interesting KPIs, or almost like strategies that we try to measure with this benchmark marks report. And one of the sneak peeks we're going to give is this question. So let's just dive right into it. You ready?

I'm here. You know I am.

Okay. So basically the question was, do you know how many key contacts you should have per account? Simple enough, right? Nobody knows. So literally 67% said they do not have a structure to track how many key contacts they should have on each account. So, and this was kind of a shocking one. And the other options are? Yes, it's an internal metric. We track which was only 20% of the responses and then, yes, that's based off a total of revenue, which is the right answer, technically 13%. So nobody knows or has the structure to track this. And why is this so important, Terry?

Well, you know, when you talk about key contacts with, with, with anyone that you're doing business with, we always used to use the term Spock. Right. Single point of contact is one of the things that scares most of businesses or should scare you. If you've only got one contact at your business partners, at your customers, you run the risk of being one person away from losing that account, that relationship completely. I don't know if there's any way I can simplify that more. But what we're seeing with this more dynamic structure of account experience, what we're seeing is multiple relationships with multiple departments and multiple users. When you start looking at the three tiers, on top of that you have a sponsor, a champion managers, and then you have the user group. Now what you start to do is get this real dynamic that if it's a really large company and you have a really huge large user base, you want to make sure that if you're going to reach out to them and ask them a question, get sentiment. You want to hear from a good sampling of that group. If I'm just hearing from one person, I Run the risk that that person loves us or hates us or they leave. God knows, Ian, we've seen that happen where our champion packs up and goes for some reason. And, you know, we're in that position where it's like, now what do we do? So, yeah. Vital to have that.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Is, like, we base a lot of account experience around our own experience of, like, how we've learned to evolve over the years. There's a famous story about Adam and the management team running our internal Net promoter score. We thought we had a great score of, like, I think it was like, 75. Everybody's really happy about it. And then we had accounts turn. And then we had another account churn. And then we had another account churn. Accounts that we thought were happy, we had great scores for. But was it? What was actually happening is we didn't really have a full account sentiment. We had one score from one person that was probably middle management that liked the idea of it. So they gave us a really high score. End of the day, everybody else hated it. So, like, the front line hated the solution and the C level hated the solution. So they turned. And what we've learned over the years is that you actually need to measure sentiment from three levels of the organization. Kerry alluded to it. The C level, the middle management, and the front line. And what this gives you is a more clear view of how people actually like your solution or are enjoying the solution or they hate it. It's so, so important because there is a ton to learn from getting the different levels. I can't tell you how many times we've talked to some of our clients that they basically, they have a C level that loves their solution. Middle management's lukewarm, and then their front line hates it. The people that are logging in every single day hate it. And that's pretty common. So you really do need that full measurement of sentiment across all of these different stakeholders.

And just imagine you have the group that's supposed to be benefiting the most from it out on your front line, right? They're driving your business. They're selling, they're retaining your customer, and they just hate the tool. So what does this do? This drags down productivity, sales retention. I mean, all the metrics we talk about that. If you're not truly getting their voice involved in that, I don't care how much the C suite loves it or how much the program manager thinks it's great if that front line is not better or the reverse Sometimes you have a Frontline that just loves their tool and it's like they're just sold on it. But then you have that one sponsor that changes who kind of comes in and it's like, well, we want to change that to something different or that doesn't work. Then you can go back as that champion and go, wait a minute, let me show you what that Frontline is really saying. This is what they love about it. This is how they use it day to day.

Yeah. And it really does go both ways, but I think back to the original benchmark. If you're not measuring it, how do you even know? I mean, that's the killer, right. 67% out of a thousand responses don't know.

And let's be honest, that 20% too, is probably doing it wrong. No offense. We're looking at 87% of the people who answered that question are probably not measuring the right group based on volume. So they're probably missing all those right voices out there.

It's really kind of shocking. I mean, and I don't know if this is because people haven't figured this out yet. I mean, like I said, we've learned along the way that we had Spock at many accounts back in the early days where we had one champion. And as soon as that champions gone, you're up Schitt's creek. Right. Like, you don't know who to reach out to. You, literally. And then all of a sudden it goes. You can tell when it goes internally. And then like, finance requests the contract and then you're like, oh, okay, okay. This is not going well. We don't know who to reach out to now. Our direct point of contact is finance, who is. It's a bad spot to be.

Yeah.

So I mean, it's so important to not only just measure it for the sentiment side, but like, measure it for, like the account strategy side. Like, make sure, you know, if this champion leaves and the other thing we run into, Carrie, which is worth mentioning, our champions get promoted. Right? They get promoted. They've done such a great job with their program that they move on to a different job. AB&BEV is a great example of this. Like, they. Our original champion is now CTO of a different division and he's not directly involved. But we knew who to go to next. We had all the champions lined up. We still had C suite buy in. We start frontline buy in. We knew who was going to be the actual program champion at the middle management level. So it wasn't a tough Transition. We didn't hear from finance, thankfully, but interesting, right?

Yeah. And hey, I would be missed to not mention a step further than that. Let's say someone goes to another company or builds out their own company. Think about that too. When you've got this lack of single contact now what you're doing is your referral program is almost baked in. Also.

Yes.

I've got 12, 20 people at these larger companies that when one goes out to take over something, we're the first thing they mentioned. So now you have a way to carry your brand with that individual. It's not just stuck with that one person of the company now. It goes in all different directions if you're doing a good job.

One stat to mention. I'm going to throw a question out to the audience, a rhetorical question. What do you think the actual percentage of our new businesses on a monthly basis from referrals? 40% on any given month. It's usually 30 to 40% is referral based business for customer gauge. That is a huge number. So if you're looking to increase your new sales and you're not doing anything like this, can you imagine that's opportunity, right? Like 40% on top of your already existing revenue if you just start a referral program. To Kerry's point, if you don't know who your users are that love you, if you don't know who your middle management. And we're not talking like three people, some of these companies are big, right? Like they have hundreds, hundreds of frontline, hundreds of middle management. That's a referral pool that you can track from company to company and you should, because that's where you're going to get that 40% uptick in revenue from referral revenue. But also, I mean, talk about a quick sales cycle. I mean our referral business, not Only is it 40% on top of our acquisition revenue, but it's. They close. I think we closed the referral in 20 days, which our sales cycle is much, much longer than that. They're fast, they pretty much close for more money. They convert better. It's our highest converting source. I mean, I could go on and on, but I mean this is gold, guys. You really should have a system in place to track this. And to Kerry's point, just segment them appropriately. Frontline, middle of management, sea level, super, super important. This episode of the Account Experience podcast is sponsored by CustomerGage, the leading B2B account experience software that ties revenue to your experience data in real time to help you make better account centric Decisions that drive revenue growth. Quick question. What do you guys think is the number one reason B2B experience programs fail? Believe it or not, it's lack of C Suite buy. In Customer Engage's research with mit, they found the quickest way to align yourselves with the C suite is to actually align with what they care about most, which is revenue. That's why Customer Gauge is literally built from the ground up to maximize and track the revenue contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken, uh, yeah, we get a good amount of free bear OneLogin, IronMountain, H&R Block, SuperOffice and SugarCRM are already using Customer Gauge to maximize their growth by tying their programs to Revm. And with over $10 billion worth of account revenue actively being managed in Customer Gauge, yeah, that's billion. With a B, they're the leader in the space. But maybe even more interesting, they found that once you get alignment with that C suite, the needs of these B2B practitioners or the program champions are evolving too. In such a complex account environment, it can be really tough to measure and act on feedback quickly across multiple departments, divisions, or even locations. Luckily, Customer Gauge has you covered there as well, with account native features that easily help you not only measure the feedback for multiple stakeholders in an account, but act on that feedback in real time. Because at the end of the day, if you're not empowering your frontline staff with the right insights to address customer issues, you're going to be dealing with the churn issue. It's not a matter of if, it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department, regardless of location, regardless of division, all in real time. No manual spreadsheets or a team of analysts are needed. CustomerGage's mission is to help B2B companies harness the power of account centric growth to drive meaningful change in their businesses. And that's a powerful thing. If you want to see Customer Gauge in action, go ahead and check out CustomerGage.com and get a demo of account experience today. You won't regret it.

Right now if you're not connected, you don't know who that frontline user is right now. And you're not surveying them, you're not talking to them. You're missing out. I mean, I'm always shocked by how many people reach out to us that we're just a frontline user. I was, you know, I was using your tool and loved it and they get into a position in a new company where they're frustrated and everyone's upset and they go, I have a solution. You know, and it's just, that's what a referral is. If someone, somebody gets a. Hits a pain point, it's like, but wait a minute, I trust these guys. I know what they can do. And I was important enough for them to survey and to talk to on top of that. Yeah, yeah, they go to bat for you. They stick with you.

They do. And it's also kind of a good indicator. We were talking to Trish on a previous podcast about. Trish is our VP of product, by the way, guys, for those of you who don't know. And she was talking about how she loves like the, I don't want to say negative, but it's like kind of rough feedback because it keeps her honest. And as a VP of product, if you get very upfront honest feedback from a frontline user that is using your product every day, it's hard not to take that seriously. Right. I mean, that's a whole other benefit that I think a lot of people don't talk about is the product side, especially in SaaS. Right? I mean, we're a SaaS company, VP's of product that get direct feedback from frontline users on the regular. I mean, come on, that's amazing.

Yeah, that's where you're gonna get the real stuff. That's where you really enhance your product. No offense, C suite, no offense, champions and managers, but your frontline users are the ones that are really using it. And listen, I said this before, I'll say it again and again. They're the ones driving your sales, they're the ones driving your growth. And if they're happy and they're able to do their job faster, quicker, with more success. You look like a rock star.

Yeah, it's true, man.

A healthy young rock star.

So the other thing that's interesting about this too is that, all right, so you don't have a structure to track account sentiment and your net promoter score. So if you're just getting one contact surveyed, like kind of what we talked about with our original story with cg, if you're only getting one contact, that's generally where a lot of companies stop. And it doesn't matter if your customer success, doesn't matter if you're CX csat, even if you get one response. That's kind of. Brian Hodge mentioned this in the previous podcast. It's kind of Net promoters Achilles heel is like sample size you need enough critical volume in your responses in order to make a, a decision around that data properly. So what happens when you only have one response and it's a really great score? You know, you're gonna make decisions off of that, thinking that you're all hunky dory or maybe do nothing, which is even worse, right? I mean, you literally sit back and you think you're all on autopilot and then you get 15 more responses if you try again and they're all sudden, really negative and your score all of a sudden goes to like a negative 30. I mean, that's a pretty big swing. And that can happen pretty, pretty on the regular, right, Kerry?

Yeah, I look at it both ways too. You know, sometimes you get that one bad score because you only have one point of contact and you feel like your biggest account with all your volume, all your revenue in it, is at risk. So now you're spinning, you're spinning trying to figure out what's going on. And it's one guy who was having a bad day or he just had one, like, he kept hitting a button that didn't do what he wanted to do do. And so he's frustrated. He gives that score and you get, you get so pulled into this, this lens through one person of that relationship. And you know, if, if you are depending on data to make decisions, you don't want to put all that on one person. It's just, it's not, it's not a strong thing, especially in a relationship.

Yeah, I completely agree. And it's also interesting when you get, you kind of alluded to it, the revenue piece involved, right, where you have revenue coverage for an account. And so just taking a step back even further, there's some accounts that you're not going to get responses from. And you should know how much or what percentage of your overall revenue does that account for. So that's your unknown bucket. But then going even further, let's say two accounts account for 40% of your revenue. What happens if you have one contact in each one of those, you know, accounts? That means a lot of your revenue is at risk. So there is that. When you tie the revenue in, and we've been preaching this forever, but tie revenue to your experience data so you can make these types of decisions where not only are you looking at it from a revenue coverage standpoint of how many accounts you have responses from, you can go a step deeper. And like, all right, in these two accounts that account for 40% of our revenue, we actually have, you know, five C level responses. We have 20 middle management responses and we have 70 frontline responses. Right. I mean, that's, that's a powerful thing to know that you have that account mapped out, you're getting responses from it, as opposed to, again, being that company that says, all right, we got one response from Account A, that's 20% of our revenue. We're good. Like, we're gonna, we're gonna let it roll. I think that's where a lot of companies stop because they just don't know any better, I think, is really what it is.

Yeah, it's Gore chasing, right? I mean, yeah, it feels good if it's a good score and we try to make those bad scores go away. But if you really want to know what the health is of that relationship, I love this organizational chart and how it's broken down because in a glance, I can very quickly tell you, this is what's happening with whatever group I'm looking at one company or a revenue bucket or, or a type of customer. I can very quickly say, look, C suites are, you know, they've got a lot of comments, they're not as happy. But the Frontline users love us right now. So how do we translate that up? How do we communicate with that? Frontline is saying, up to let that C Suite, that leadership know, hey, your users actually are in love with us. What are you frustrated about from your level? So we can. And this ties into return on investment. You know, I walk into a board meeting and I have to explain why I'm spending X dollars on a solution. And it's, well, let me bring to you the voice of the people that are using it, why it's so valuable and how it's tied to our success. And I think this just opens up a really. It's the hardest thing is how do you tie revenue to that program that you're paying for or to that workforce that you have out there? And if you can show it in this way, you know what an argument you can make, you can buy that C Suite into whatever it is that solution is.

So, yeah, just to paint the picture for anybody listening, I have an image up of our organizational charts. This is a widget in our system that gives you the ability to track responses and scores at all three levels. Four, technically, if you count undefined. So if you don't have a segment on one type of person, it's undefined. But basically, A is C level, B is middle management, and C is Frontline. You can kind of see that in this example Our C suite is in the red. So they're not super happy. They're detractor. And then the C suite, or sorry, the C level, which is frontline, we have multiple responses, all very happy. So very specific problem, right? You have a bunch of very happy frontline users, which is great. And then you have a kind of a C suite that doesn't really see the value in the solution. So this would tell the CSM or the account manager to spend some time cycles with that upper management.

Into your visual. Ian, there's only one person at that A level and if we had just surveyed that one person at that A level, we would walk away from this like, oh my God, they hate us, they're going to dump us. The only thing that calls my attention to this example is at that B level who's really usually our best relationship. It's usually the person we work with the most. I haven't heard from them yet, so there's an absence of signal here that I'm a little bit worried about. So either they lost their champion again, speaks to why we should really make sure we have multiple points of contact, or for some reason that person hasn't gotten back to us. And to me that's almost a bigger alarm is why don't I have someone there or why have they not gotten back to me? I need to address that pretty quickly also.

Yeah, it's a really interesting point because in this scenario, technically you could probably extrapolate out that because we don't have responses from the middle management, which is usually the champion. To your point, when that contract for quote unquote, customer gauge or whoever the account is comes up, that C suite has a six. They're a detractor. They're gonna be like, yeah, I don't get it, we're not gonna pay for this anymore. Even though you have a ton of frontline staff that are very happy with the solution, if there's no champion to report up to the C level, you got it. Probably getting the ax here, unfortunately.

And you said it, you said it, that, that, that champion at B level on this particular example is who usually delivers that communication up to your C suite. They're the one that has a deck and a report ready for them. They're the ones that, that rally behind whatever initiative it is. And that's what I'm kind of analyzing. I mean, it's pretty amazing we did that analytics right so quickly here. But just by looking at this, there's a gap. We're missing something. C suite's upset Frontline uses us. We need to swoop in and fix this. And that you and I just made a very strategic decision because we didn't have a single point of contact. We had a full picture here of a user base, and it allows us to know I need to get in touch with my champion or find out why there's not one there.

Yeah. And it's interesting, too, like the. If you look at the average scores across all of the levels, it's 8.5, which is almost a promoter. So, like, you. You think you're in good shape. Right. I mean, that's the crazy part. But if you don't have the trackability or the segmentation of, like, the different levels, you know that your C suite probably has a little bit more weight than a ton of happy Frontline staff and that you might need to do some work there. But if you just looked at the average score, you're. You think you're sitting pretty. But again, I look at this organizational chart, I think nine times out of 10, I'd say you're probably about to turn an account, which is wild.

Yeah. And it's. And you're right. It's a very high NPS score.

Yeah.

You know, so it's interesting. So.

Yeah.

And to my argument where I. How I started off with. If you're just looking at NPS by itself as a standalone, here's a company running a mid-80s NPS. You would think they're good. We have nothing to worry about. But your key stakeholder here, your key decision maker in signing that check, and that renewal is a detractor. So you gotta look past that benchmark. So when your boss says, how's our score compared to other departments or other companies? You gotta be a little more dynamic with your score a little bit. Dive in a little bit deeper.

Yeah. And back to the original benchmark that we're teasing here. How many of you have a structure to manage multiple stakeholders? And it's. 67% said they don't have a structure. 67%, that's the majority. And that's scary because we know what can happen, and we just demonstrated it. When you don't have a good system to measure this, I mean, we hope this helps you guys understand why it's important to get the account sentiment. It's not just a single contact sentiment or just calling one piece of feedback, the count sentiment. It's not. It's not the case. It's not the same thing. So we would highly, highly encourage you guys to look at it from that standpoint, the frontline, middle management, C level, if you can divide it up, if you can't give us a call, we can help out. But that's really what it's about, guys, is making sure you have checks and balances in place. That's really what this is. Right. You can't really rely on that promoter. And we love it to death. It's amazing for certain things, but for a modern program, you need a little bit extra spice on it to make sure that you're really covering your bases. Because if you just blindly believe in the score, might not work out too well. Especially if you don't have a good sense for, you know, the size of the responses or the type. So, like, are they the majority of your revenue? It can go kind of off the rails pretty quick.

Yeah. And don't care what you call it either. Don't let anything go undefined. But listen, no matter what kind of company you're dealing with, we know there's three levels. There's the upper level, that's strategic. C suite could be a small company. It's the business owner. It's the guy who owns the company. Fine. And then you've got this middle suite. That's the management, that's the group that's out there, who's managing the people. And then there's that, like I always said, there's that front line. There's that group that's out there. That's literally the face of your business, touching every single one of your customers. As long as you segment it in one of those three buckets, you start to get a pretty good idea of how your relationship is with each of them. So don't get caught up. Don't worry about, oh, is he this? Is he that. What's their role into their organization? Drop them into the right bucket. So key boom.

So we'll keep it short and sweet today. If you guys like these little sneak peek benchmarks, podcasts, we'll do some more of them. We have, I think over like 50 data points that we're. Yeah, we got a ton. So eventually we're gonna write a comprehensive report here, but for now, we're gonna start teasing these out so you guys can kind of get some value from it before we release the report. As always, thank you to my co host, Kerry T. Cell for joining me and we'll talk next time.

Thank you.