How Trust Leads to Revenue Growth

I genuinely believe that when you've got trust, you can ask for more in your relationship. And if you're asking for more, you're going to grow the business.

Hi, this is Adam Durrell and I'm here today with Nigel Torda. Hi, Nigel, how you doing?

Hi there, Adam. Good to be back.

We're on episode two of our journey into how to start with experience. And this comes from the CPG Experience Council. Nigel, we really good job on the last episode of talking about clicks, the process. Can you summarize what clicks are again?

Yeah. So clicks is when your customer experience program just all clicks together and it works because when it works, you generate revenue growth, which is what we'll talk about in a moment. But you get there by a catalyst that starts a customer experience program. All of your leadership buying into this. In every single function, you interconnect the whole business with the customer and the customer experience journey. You have a culture of curiosity to find new things and new ways to be able to improve. And then you deliver it into the customer by surpassing their expectations. And when you do that, it all clicks together. And the belief, which is what we're going to talk about next, is when you get that correct and everything clicks every single time that customer experience delivers revenue growth. And that's the real magic for every single business because that's one of the huge definitions of success for any B2B relationship that are both parties in that relationship able to grow their revenue profitably?

Yeah, I think that's. This is a really good place to start. So why don't we start off with beliefs, the belief system. And I know this is something you're particularly passionate about. So in your life as a chief customer officer, what was your strongest belief?

I narrow it down. There's probably only one. If I can only choose one, then there's a link of three things together that basically says, where do you start? For me, you always start with the employees of the brand owner because they provide the starting point and almost the ceiling to the experience. So if I can create a really good employee experience for my employees as a brand owner, they provide then the service to the customer and they provide the customer experience that ultimately provides the consumer experience. And I think when you get those three things right in order, every single moment in my career where I've seen those things improve in that sequence, then it's delivered to ultimately to revenue growth for both brand owner and and the customers because the consumers have delivered more. And it's rooted in that belief that happy people Do a better job. And if you can have happy employees and you can have happy customers, then lo and behold, you have happy consumers and they actually purchase more in whatever category.

It's really interesting.

How about yours?

Well, I'll come to that in a second, but I just want to pick up on what you're saying because I also really believe this is an important part of it. But it's interesting. In the 15 to 17 years that I've been doing this, the, the islands of measuring customer experience and measuring employee experience have always been far apart. And it's really hard to connect them. I mean, we're doing some work now that thinks about how to do this, but it is hard. And it's often because employee experience comes from the HR department, which has a different focus really on the business. And so getting these things together has been hard. But I truly believe, I think this is going to be the next frontier of.

It's interesting because you're right because sometimes you can't always prove this in numbers. But I think the world has changed in my working lifetime that I go back when I got into my first big leadership position. I didn't have all the data and the analytics. I had to use good judgment, intuition, and I had to believe that what I was doing was correct. And I think the leaders of today still have got those three things. You've got experience, you've got good judgment, and you've got your belief system. But now you can start to put the data and the analytics and the insights behind it to be able to prove some of those beliefs. But it starts with somebody believing something. We look at some of those bigger businesses out there, things that are publicly listed that we'd all recognize. Your story about Apple.

Oh yeah.

They believed in something way before anybody else did. And then they used their relationship with their businesses and their consumers to be able to prove it.

Yeah, I can give some amplification to that. I recently did some work on this to find out how many times people mention the word customer when they're a CEO in their public pronouncements. And Tim Cook, who's a CEO of Apple, of course, I think it's one of the most customer focused people we can think about. He mentioned the word customer 33 times in a 20 minute speech. You know, it's like an average of one once every minute or so that he talks about this. It's really central to it. And yet you see other leaders, they don't even think, they don't even talk about customers. It's Very all about the business and their staff and delivery. So I think it's really interesting to see how core that is to the culture and that that really is part of the catalyst I guess we were talking about in the last episode.

Well, it is. I don't know about you, but I've been asked, there must be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousand questions I've been asked over my career. You can't know the answer to everything as a leader. What you can rely on is your belief system will guide you through a consistent response every time. And I think that's what happens with Apple. That whenever they get asked a question, you watch the responses not just in a speech but how they respond from the CEO the way down. It's what our customers want. I mean there's a fine line between customers and consumers in the Apple example. But you go all the way into an Apple store, it's all set up about that experience. And I think about every one of their staff members in that store, which is an extension of that B2B relationship. They behave in exactly the same way that their CEO does.

Yeah.

It's all rooted in what does a customer want, what's the next customer in the chain want and how can I best service that.

And also to sort of close the loop on the thing you were saying about the employee experience. Apple's a really good example of having very motivated employees. There's a strong belief system there and a strong mission. A really good example of that. Nigel, I think we should cover the sort of the employee experience topic in another episode. We should devote something to that because that requires a lot of air on its own actually. But if I can come back to the point you were asking me about. So what's my belief system? So I love the employee, the happy employee equals happy customers part for me. I'm all about feedback because I really believe that the thing that makes a good relationship, to be honest, whether it's a relationship in the family or romantic relationship or a business relationship, feedback has got a lot to do with this. This is, you know, really what I've learned over the years.

Yeah.

And that, you know, for me that's about having regular check ins that has the ability to do a couple of things. First of all, it's curiosity that we spoke about before. You know, how is it going with you? And then soliciting it. So when you hear that feedback. Well, it's, you know, I'm kind of a bit unhappy about some of the things happening. You got to play it Back. Did I hear that right? What I heard you say was, you're unhappy about this thing. Did I hear that right? You know, that's really closing the loop on something. And you're not solving the problem right there, but you're just making sure that you have a shared understanding. So that's something I really try to do in all of my relationships, but that's what my mission is to bring to business. And I think that's, you know, that's what I think is the most essential part of an experience program, to make sure that when you listen to customers, you play it back to them. And you said, did I hear that right? I don't know if I can solve it right now, but did I at least understand this? Because then I can do something about it.

Well, in that B2B world, it is about people doing business with people, and that is the B2B relationship. And there's something you spark there about relationships, because for most of us, our most trusted relationship is in our personal lives, whether it's with your partner, your wife, your husband, or your children. And what's interesting is if you just take it as a step back for a moment, when you've got a really good relationship, you tend to ask for more from it because you trust that what you're giving isn't going to be abused when it's received and vice versa. The more you give, the more you get it. Just that's how relationships build. And I think the same is true with businesses. The more trusted the relationship becomes, then the more you prepare to give and the more prepared you are to receive, and it just flourishes and it grows it. If you start with using the illustration of negotiation, if you've only got one negotiation variable to argue over, which is price, it tends to go down. Somebody has to win for somebody to have to lose. The more you trust the other person and the more negotiation variables you put onto the table, the more both of you can actually grow. And I mean, I think you heard the example of in the beer business, one of the drays. I think it was the Heineken example. You told me a couple of weeks ago.

Hold on, hold on one second. I just want to check in with this because you mentioned the word drays.

Yeah.

On the last episode. And when I think of the word drace, I'm thinking of a guy on Hall.

You know, I know I'm aging myself terribly.

I know that may well be the name for all I know. And I know that Heineken and Amsterdam, they still they still got a kind of a show, I call them, but they have.

I mean, I call them drays because I loved every time I wanted to learn about the beer business. Yeah, right to the end customer, which was if you're delivering to the bars and the restaurants, it's on the drays. You go on the drays, you learn so much. Or they go on the trucks. But the. When you go to the convenience stores or the grocery stores, go and talk to the person who builds the display in the grocery store, the last person who puts the stock on the shelf, that's the last person who touches your brand before the consumer gets hold of it. And they will tell you so much more than anything else that End Customer is just an amazing place to be able to learn things from.

I'm really going to pick up on this because we heard this great story from Heineken, you remember that, about how there's so much trust that can be built up between the customer and the delivery driver, for want of a better word, the drays. That one example was given that the. The bar owner was prepared to give the truck driver the keys to the bar. So when he could come in at 9 o' clock in the morning, drag the hoses across the floor, fill up the kegs and then go clean up. You know, I mean, what an example of great trust there that, you know, this is your livelihood and you give the keys to somebody that's just delivering the beer. I think it's fantastic.

It does. I mean, it happens everywhere, all the way across the world. The amount of trust. If you think of a landlord and a delivery partner who gets to that level, how many things do you think they're going to buy from that person? Not just one. They'll buy kegs, they'll buy bottles, they'll buy cans, they'll buy different categories, they'll buy everything. And there's the proof point for me that the moment you get to trust, that trust means that I'm prepared to buy more. The moment you start to buy more products, guess what? Your revenue starts to grow. And I think the same holds true in any category, in any B2B relationship. The more you start to trust the B2B relationship, the more you prepare to ask for things that you might not ask if you didn't trust them, because you don't know whether it's going to get used against you or for you together. But if you've got a trusting relationship, you can ask for so much more. And it runs two ways. One of the things I got told a long time ago was the answer's always yes, if. But it's quite often, you see, in this current world, the computer says no, it's technology driven. Whereas actually when you're in that B2B relationship, it can't all be technology driven because you need the creativity of two people or two groups of people talking to each other to find a new way to generate a deeper level of trust. And when you've got trust, you can do everything from, I need to ask for a price increase because my court raw materials have gone up. But when you've got trust, it's trusted. That is required. It's just amazing trust. I genuinely believe that when you've got trust, you can ask for more in your relationship. And if you're asking for more, you're going to grow the business.

Yeah, there's definitely. There's a really good book I can recommend. I'll put it in the show Notes about how to manufacture trust, which I did, which I did recently, and a podcast on that one.

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But let's recap what we got so far. It's in order to, you know, basically to drive the revenue, which is important for all of us, we all need to make sure that we get paid for a living, is that you need to have the belief and then you need to have the Relationship. Let's move on to the proof point because this comes back to also you're in the clicks, the leadership, you need to keep reinforcing that. So let's go move on to the proof point on this. And I can give one example. You know, we measure net promoter the whole time for people and again, we've been doing this for 15 years. And when we've done the measurements before, we know that promoters, that's the people at score nines and tens, are worth more than detractors, which are the people that score 0 to 6. When we first started doing the research, we realized it was about twice as much. But we've recently seen in some businesses an even bigger scale. As companies get better at this, I say their promoters are worth three times more than the detractors are. And so this is a really good way if you can find a way of measuring this in your customer base, it's a very easy way to identify this and to communicate it to your employees to say that if we can create promoters, they're likely to spend something like two to three times more than detractors are. That's a wonderful mnemonic to do this. And as you keep measuring it, you can really work this out. So that's a good measurement of doing a great job on belief and relationship, I think.

Well, let me build on that then. So if I go back to that belief system where we started the conversation. So you're almost closing the loop on our little storyline from today.

I'm doing my best.

Well, no, no, it's lovely. You led me to the well so nicely. But you imagine got promoters in your employee base that are going beyond what a detractor would do. Imagine you've got promoters in your customer experience and your B2B relationship that are going beyond what a detractor would do. And then you go to the consumers and you've got promoters instead of detractors. You imagine you've got promoters doing three times more in the employee base, the customer base and the consumer base. So ex multiplied by cx multiplied by cx again with consumer. Yeah, that is when it just the growth potential that you've now unlocked, when you've taken that trust generates growth. It's so amplified. And when I've only ever experienced it a few times in my career because it's hard work to get all three to work. But when you do, you need every single function playing its part. This is no longer just a customer function. It's brands, it's finance, it's Supply chain. It's invoicing, it's audit, it's legal. Everybody's working on the way that. How can you just get to a point where we've got promoters on every single one of those three things? And the thing that holds it all together, the connection between your employee base and the consumer base, is the customer experience you provide in that B2B relationship.

Yeah. And I think we will find a really good example. Coca Cola Hellenic are particularly good at this. They've really got this belief things now, and they match the employee experience with the customer experience. And to do that, they teach, have a very strong education track for all their employees about what it means to do that. So we'll get some examples of that and we'll put it in the education track.

Yeah. No, perfect. I mean, I think it runs so many different ways. Where businesses are so complex now, you have to rely on another business or another medium to get from a brand owner to all the consumers you've got around the world. Whether you're just working in one marketplace or you're working globally. It is that B2B relationship. And there's nothing worse than imagine I use a blanket term of a courier. If a courier throws a parcel over my gate and it smashes, I'm just as annoyed with the brand owner for employing that courier as they am with a courier for doing it. And that customer experience in today's world is so important to get right because it's a chain of events that you've just got to get there. But if that courier finds a nice place to put the parcel that's safe, sends me a photograph and puts it on a communication tool that I've got, whatever that is, so I know it's done correct. Guess what? I'm likely to buy from them again because they looked after me.

Yeah, I agree. It really is experience as far as doing this. Nigel, we should wrap up today's episode just summarizing where we are. It's leading to revenue. You need to have a strong belief system, relationship and proof points and anything else you wanted to add to that.

I think that the proof point is often hard. And one of the things I've learned over the years, I've had some very, very bright people help me in my career. Don't look for the obvious connections because there was a. Something we talked about last time around. It's lots of bricks that make a wall. You might need to find three or four of those bricks to start to get a pattern. You might need to find 10 to 20 to 30 of those patterns to get to the proof point. And this doesn't change in one day or one week. It changes as a trend over time. And the trend is the most important thing. Once you've found that correct trend, you start to see the results come through in the revenue line.

Super. That's a great place to stick the ending on this. Dijal, that's great. Thanks a lot. We'll see you for the next episode.

Perfect. Talk soon.

Bye.

Sam.