Tying Revenue to Your B2B Experience Program

I think everyone should be very nervous if they're not measuring return on investment, because in tough times, even in good times, your shareholders are always looking for a place to cut a few dollars or to make yourself look a little bit more beefy. They're going to go after the programs that can't prove this, but you put yourself at risk of being something that goes away if you can't put a.

Dollar mile on it.

And it's just a lesson we learned over and over again. What you don't measure, doesn't get done, doesn't get invested in, doesn't get bought into.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. I'm here with my co Host, as always, Mr. Carrie T. So say hello, Carrie.

Hello, everyone.

We're going to continue, guys. We keep getting a lot of great feedback. We like the benchmarks, we like the little sneak peeks. So we're going to do another one today, and this one's really, really interesting. We've been holding this one under lock and key for the last three weeks because we're so excited to talk about it, but we finally get to break it out and reveal it all to the world. So you guys ready for this? I'm assuming that's a yes from everybody.

I'm cheering over here.

Let's do this. So we asked the question, have you calculated the total ROI of your B2BCX program? Now, we preach this a lot and we talk about how important it is to calculate the ROI of your program so you can maintain buy in from the C level, but also show your worth to every C level and middle management and frontline staff that this is worthwhile. This is growing the business. This is generating a return. So we were hopeful when we asked this question that people would start to see the light. Not to say that some haven't, but let me give you the stat. 60% of over a thousand responses have said they don't track the ROI. 60%. Carrie. Hit me, man. What are your thoughts now?

I don't know why I was so excited.

I thought just brought it right down.

Wah, wah, wah.

Yeah, you know. God, how do I say this? Every program, every initiative is doomed to fail if you don't measure your return on investment. What does that mean? That means if you're not measuring the money you are paying to do something and then calculating how much that produced on the other side, you are not running a business.

Sorry.

It's the number one reason why every business fails. And I'm not here to Preach to you. But I was shocked to see 60% of, you know of. And, and there's this other category we haven't talked about, the other 24%. But you know, and you'll see these numbers, you know, break these down even further. Consider that more than 3/4 of people out there, businesses out there that completed this don't do this calculation. And I'll take it a step further. A lot of companies don't do it for different programs they're running. Forget about the big picture. I'm paying this much out to get this much in. But what about these individual projects, programs, departments that each company has? And when we're talking about customer experience, account experience, if you're not measuring that, how do you know it's working? I think this is shocking. I know we're going to break this down just a little bit more and dive into it a little bit, but very surprised that these many companies weren't measuring it.

So there is a positive side to this. So 24% of those surveyed said that no, they haven't calculated the roi, but they have seen some positive financial implications. So that's interesting. But at the same time, they haven't measured the ROI of the program. So I mean, it's so important to take that next step because then it's literally, if you can show that you have financial implications tied to the program, that is fantastic. But I think what the C Suite really does understand is return on investment. So like, at the end of the day, these programs cost money to stand up. We've talked about this at length. Kerry's talked about this and from his days in the program world areas, other companies, these things cost money. Not just software, but investments in hr, investments in resources, almost consulting sometimes. I mean, it costs money to run these things sometimes, especially with big, large, complex B2B organizations. So proving that you have a correlation to financial implications is great. But at the end of the day, you need to prove that not only are you covering the cost of the program, but you're making money on top of that because that's ultimately what you answer to. The CFO is going to look at this thing and say, you're spending $500,000 on this program. Like, yeah, great, you measured how much on an upsell or referral. But if you can't say, yeah, we've generated a 300% ROI, like it's a good, sound financial decision, that's going to be a tough conversation.

Yeah, yeah.

And I can't tell you how many times I think Ian, we talked about this too on the podcast. We both ran programs that let's be together. We strung together with, like gum and, you know, a piece of duct tape. You know, like, we did whatever we could and the cost was low. We paid the price for that. So maybe the return on investment wasn't very high, but we paid the price because we put more time, more money in it by not having a healthy program, but by not measuring it at all. I think everyone should be very nervous if they're not measuring return on investment, because in tough times, even in good times, your shareholders are always looking for a place to cut a few dollars or to make yourself look a little bit more beefy. They're going to go after the programs. They can't prove this. But you put yourself at risk of being something that goes away if you.

Can'T put a dollar amount on it.

And it's just a lesson we learned over and over again. What you don't measure, doesn't get done, doesn't get invested in, doesn't get bought into.

Yeah. And just to follow up on that point, especially now, I think this is a really unique topic right now because Covid, everything that's happened, we know that companies are trying to save money, they're trying to make money. These are the two main purposes for a business to two different ways they can grow. They can either save money, they can make money. Going back to the marketing side, I believe that you had to pivot your messaging to be in one of those buckets. You either have to be saving company's money or you have to be making companies money. We are account experience. We help you grow your account base via referrals, upsells, cross sells. Right. Not going to give you the whole sales pitch, but we are very much in the camp of we make you money. But where it gets interesting is if you shadow that line and you're not doing either one of those, it's. It's really difficult, like you said, to kind of fight for the survival of your program. It just, you gotta prove it one way or another. And ROI is just one of those things that if you can calculate it and it's backed up by data and it gets checked, nobody can argue that 300% ROI. Who wouldn't invest in that? It's just not even a conversation at that point.

Right. So let me put you on the spot, Ian. Let me turn the tables. You're usually putting me on the spot with the hot question. And I've asked this of you before, a few Times, be prepared. Why do you think companies aren't doing it? This number, about 84% of these people completed this. What do you think is keeping them away from doing it?

It's hard. That's honestly the top level reason it's hard to do. And I think that a lot of companies are just kind of coasting on the we're making a better customer centric experience and think that's enough. And they find out too late that it's not actually. But to kind of circle back to your original question. It's hard to measure referrals and track it back. Like as a marketer, I know that it's hard to attribute things like that is a difficult thing to do as a marketer. So if you're asking somebody that maybe, like if the experience program doesn't live in marketing, like if it lives in the experience department or it lives in operations, it can be difficult to figure out how to attribute a referral from an experience program back to the source of the experience program or attribute upsell, cross sell from sales back to a survey. That can be difficult. And there are some liberties you have to take, like influence, and that's a dirty word in marketing right now. But these types of things have to be measured that. You know what, you're right. It wasn't the direct cause of the. The upsell, but the survey was what started the conversation in the first place. So, yeah, technically I would give that some pretty heavy influence on the actual result, which would be a revenue result. Right. So that's a long answer. But I think it's hard. It's hard to figure out how to measure it properly. There's a lot of dynamics that can happen within a company that make it difficult. Sometimes you don't have the right people to figure it out. Sometimes there's a million things that can go wrong. And you know that, Carrie, There's a million things that can go wrong in these programs. But that's one of the main things I think that I see time and time again is that it's just, there's a lot of gray and if you don't try to tackle it, you kind of get paralyzed by the fear of just not knowing how to do it.

All right, so you hit the points I thought you would. And we've talked about this. But a, it's hard. And I think hard translates to sometimes I don't know how to do it.

Yeah.

And that's, that's go get help. Or at least, at least try. Right. The second part of that too is that fear factor. When a company makes a dollar, everyone wants to stay claim to that dollar. And creating a direct path to that dollar is not always as easy as you want. Listen, good companies, we're not all trying to lay claim to the $1. You know what we want to say. We made that dollar and this is where we think the success came from in that dollar. If you have a, like you said, if you have a good measurement system, a way to start to connect those dots, then you can start to say, look, that dollar was influenced maybe by 20% here, 40% here, but definitely this group closed it out at the final 40%. And you could start looking at that return on investment. You also said something going into that too, which I want to really bring light on. There's two ways to make money and we know one of them is, I wouldn't say it's a big money maker savings. You're never going to save yourself into growth or into this huge company. It's impossible.

Right?

What you're doing is you're hedging your bets. You're kind of making sure you're not, the building's not burning behind you, right? So saving is one way to put money in the bank, or at least keep money in the bank.

Let's call it what it is.

And we can break that down, talk a little bit about it. But there's that second one where it's actually making its growth, cross selling referrals. We keep talking about that to ad nauseam, but, but this is important to understand. Where do you start with measuring roi? You got to go to those two places. How can my program help me save money? How can my program help me make money or grow?

Absolutely. It goes back to like, what's the purpose of the program? Right? So like, what is the goal? What is the, what is the main driving force behind that program? Are you doing it to create a better experience for your customers? Of course. But is that the main one? I would argue probably it shouldn't be. Are you trying to grow your account base through starting conversations with your customers, getting feedback, opening up that forum with your customers, with your accounts? I think we all know that's where we stand on it, that these conversations lead to revenue growth. If you track it properly, if you set up the right format, the right framework to get these referrals, upsells, cross sells involved, I think that's, that's a pretty good goal. And if you make that your goal of your program, then you focus on setting up that framework. Of tracking. Right. Because that's like, all right, well, if we're going to run this thing, we got to figure out how to track it. It's the first thing that gets answered. It's not necessarily like, yeah, I could rant about this, Kerry, because I really feel very strongly about, you know, the goal of the program should be to drive growth through your customers. Yeah, of course you want to create an amazing experience, but if you're not generating revenue, you're gonna. The program will fail because you can't prove an roi. You're spending a ton of money, ton of resources, just doing something. Cause you think it's good. It's just. Yeah, it could end really badly if you don't tie it to money.

Let's do this. Ian, why don't we break this down a little bit? Why don't we take a look at these three, two or three buckets. Bucket number one is money in, right? What do we pay? The second bucket is kind of, where can we save? And the third bucket is where can we grow or make more money? So that first bucket, where can we save? So what are some. If we were just going to grab an Excel sheet, let's say we didn't have a wonderful tool or a calculator of some sort to plug this into. Right. Magical device. And we were just going to start from scratch here, the napkin, even. Where are some places that companies save money? Where do we go to say okay, or to. I'm sorry, where are we spending our money? Where are we putting investment into our program? So what are some things that we would measure? What are some things that we're spending money on? Obvious things, big picture.

I mean, we're software companies. The software is sometimes an expense.

Right. There you go. So what tools are you using? Right. What products? Yep, definitely.

So, like, dedicated resources, things like that. I mean, you gotta put a number on that.

Hours worked. I mean, again, Ian used another word, gray. I use fuzzy. We all kind of play with that a little bit. But look, this is. If you want an exact number, get out of the game now because you're never going to nail it down. Right. You just want to get a feel for where you're at. Then you can start improving as you go along. But yeah, so hours, I had 20 man power hours on that this week. Our average hourly rate of that group is this. Okay, Boom. That's our number.

I'm kind of related to that training. So, like, I think there's a pretty significant training cost there. Right. Like somebody like yourself would have to go from spot to spot training everybody up on the actual program. What it's, you know, purposes. There's travel associated with that. So there's a training cost there. I think I would separate that out from actual, like, resources.

That sounds about right. I always go. I always do the people process, product. We nailed those three. I think we talked about the people investment. We talked about. The only other exception I would throw out there is if there is an outside resource you're utilizing.

Right.

Consulting, you know, you're in marketing, me in education. We do utilize different partners to help us get over the hump on some things or we bring the specialists in. That's really good at X. So, I mean, that would have to be factored in also. No blind spots. Right. We just put it all out there. So this is a good exercise to work with finance and operations, kind of anything that sticks.

Let's just truly measure what this is.

Costing us to do Education.

Well, you said training.

Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah.

Yeah. As the education guy, I'm going to lump those together.

I think.

Hell, I say communications education. I think, I think what marketing does just in a simple email. Let me toot your horn for you. I learned more from your emails than I have from a lot of courses I took in college.

Go on.

So, I mean, that's, that's the truth. So communication, education, training, I lump all those together. And there's a cost to all that.

Right? Yeah. So.

So, okay, so that's our investment.

Right?

That's. That's what we're paying to do what we do, whatever it is. Okay, so let's move over to the second bucket, the save bucket. This is the bucket that every company thinks they're going to become millionaires on, which I always kind of giggle a little bit.

Right.

So let's break this down a little bit. Where do companies save money? What are some of the places? I guess we could use the same formula, almost the people process and the product. But where do companies save money? What are some ways that we save money, especially in our industry, like a.

SaaS kind of subscription thing.

I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind because I'm a marketer is marketing. So literally, you survey your customers, you get referrals, you're saving a ton of money acquiring those customers through referrals. So that's the first place I go is cost of acquisition. So you save a ton of money if you get that program up and running. Yep. So that's number one on my list.

That's a neat one too, because not only is it a savings to do it internally with a resource instead of outsourcing it, but then it turns into a growth which is going to fill another bucket. Right. So I like that. For me, I'm a process guy, so for me, when you streamline the process, if you can do one touch instead of four touches, you can have one process that kind of does multiple things. You know, two birds with one stone philosophy.

Love it.

So I think really tightening up the ship a little bit and running more efficiently is a good one. Another one that's big for us. Retention.

Yep.

You know, making sure you pick up the phone and call that upset customer or picking up the phone and thanking that customer that gave you praise.

Right.

That in itself is saving because it's not like you've gone out to acquire, you're not paying a lot of money, but there is an effort that goes behind that 100%.

Yeah, that's a great one.

What else?

What else? Anything else you can think of in the save category?

No, I think again, my, my mind goes to like CSM's time. Right. So like actual service levels, things like that, where you, you can definitely skirt some of that and save some time. But I think that you probably already covered that with your first point. But. Yeah, but it's.

I think it's a good one. Yeah, I think it's what, what are your people spending their time on? Right. And measuring, measuring that in the investment component. But also there is a lot of savings there if you're doing it right. The only other thing to think of too, and I hate to say this, but really doing an inventory of what solutions you're paying for, what are the products that you have in your toolbox?

True.

And do you have two or three tools in there that are doing the same damn thing for two or three different departments? I think this is where breaking through the silos a little bit can help save.

That's a great point. I just got off the phone with G2 Crowd and the conversation was basically about their grid for customer experience management, essentially. This is kind of a longer story, but I'll try to truncate it here. They fit a bunch of these like one off quote unquote customer experience products like birdeye or reputation.com that do like very one. One small specific facet of customer experience management. I feel like that echoes my experience with some other companies. They have a ton of these quote unquote customer experience products on payroll when they could probably consolidate into one that does all of it a lot better than maybe even like a single. They have like six different products for like six different aspects of experience when they could just have one that consolidates it all. So. Yeah, I think you're right on that for sure. You can definitely save some money there if you think about it properly.

Yeah, Consolidation and also just making them work together. Yeah, that in itself can cost you a fortune if you can find one that's already, you know, coexisting already has built in integrations that are natural.

There's definitely a huge savings there. So.

All right, so money spent how we can save, maybe we're looking at maybe 10, 20, 30% tops. I mean, that's. You have to be running really a majorly streamlined to have that kind of impact.

Right.

Let's talk about where the real magic happens.

Right?

That growth bucket. So what are some ways, and I think you hinted on one of them that I love. We both love that referral one, but what are some ways that we can grow? Where do we get that dollars? Where do those dollars come in from?

Referrals, upsells, cross sells, all that good stuff. So definitely referrals number one for us. We generate a lot of new business from referrals. And this is from users. Previous users. Champions. Previous champions. Doesn't matter. If people love you, they will move somewhere else and think about you when the time comes.

And let's remind everyone, Ian, cheaper to bring on board. Yes, they have high expectations, but they also will pay more. They will stay with you. Yeah. So we know that. So referrals are definitely a way to take off. Talk to me about Cross Sell, though. That one's interesting. What do you mean by cross sell?

Yeah, so like, for example, prospect, our customer has product A and they're really, really happy with product day. And through the conversations and the surveying, they get some feedback about, you know, just love it. If XYZ was available or, you know, we could really. We really want to try to focus on this on a qbr and they're talking about improving their business in one area that we know Product B solves that pretty nicely and the customer just doesn't have a clue about it. That wouldn't have happened without an experience program. You uncover that cross Sell opportunity, and that's again, money in the bank. Right? You're selling to customers, they know you, they trust you, you're their trusted advisor. Cross sell is just a really. I don't want to say easy, because nothing's easy in sales, but it's a very Good, efficient way to increase that revenue bucket on top of referrals, upsells. For sure.

We could do a whole podcast on the right way to sell and do it a healthy way. But you said something that's so important to me, like some companies are just throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks. So you're getting that account exec who's calling you once a week and go, we got a great deal. It's like, you don't understand me, man. You haven't even asked me. And I think you said something really key in there, Ian, by having a really healthy way to collect that input and to have a CX program, then you can say, look, I keep hearing them say this or I heard them say that we have a solution for that. It's truly understanding a person's pain point.

And to me, that's a healthy, let me help you. It's a mutually beneficial thing. I'm going to make a little bit money here because I'm going to grow my account with you. Yes. But I'm going to help you look like a superstar. And that ROI calculation, which we're about to get to at the end here, is going to grow. You're going to walk into that exec board and go, I made us this much money, not saved, not cut. I made us this much money because of this. So it's such a win across the board.

And by the way, The ROI is six digits. No, I'm just kidding.

10 times, 20 times, right? Yeah. So, okay, so I think it's pretty obvious, right, where those three. And the calculation is easy. You take how much you spent.

Right.

And then you take what you saved and what you have grown or earned. You put those together. The difference between the two is your return or lack of return on investment.

That's right.

Pretty simple.

Pretty simple.

So why is the number not changing as we're talking?

Just to remind everybody, the number that we're talking about for the stat is have you calculated total ROI of your program and it's at 60%? No, they don't. Yeah, in theory. That's technically how simple it can be, Kerry. So thanks, thanks for walking us through that. I think that's helpful, right? I mean, sometimes we tend to overcomplicate things. I think the recommendation on our end would be to obviously work with a exceptional software provider that can help you do it. Small plug there. God, puke. I felt weird saying that. No, but seriously, find, find somebody in your organization. We have a couple people that we can just go to when it comes to data, when it comes to operations, when it comes to processes, find that person, guy or gal that can just step in and just problem solve for those specific issues, Right? Like I need to track these referrals, I need to track these upsell and cross sells. I need attribution on this. There's always going to be somebody that knows how to do it. You might have to drag it out of them, but there's always talented people at these companies. And I'm sure you guys are already thinking about the one or two people that can do it at yours. What is the downside here? And that's really where I always come back to is like, what is the downside for doing this? Even if you fail, you get one out of three, you figure out how to track referrals. But you can't do cross selling upsell yet. Who cares? That is still referrals accounts for 40% of our new revenue every single month. Guys like, start with one, you'll get there, you'll get that positive roi. I mean, am I crazy, Kerry?

Yeah. Again, the only possible thing to be afraid of, and I hate to say this, but I have to be the kind of the bad guy in the room, is when you do the measurement, you're going to learn that your program, you're overpaying or you're not getting the return on it. Yeah, but even in that, that is a sign that, okay, so I can fix that. Then to know you have a problem is when you can begin to put a solution in place. And I mean, talk about being the most powerful guy in the room. When you walk in, or girl or whatever you are, you know, I mean, you walk in with this, this is what we're paying. This is, this is the return on that. And listen, I think we do this unconsciously every time we get on a call to review a contract or, or you look at those two cars you have outside right now and you're thinking, do I really need two cars? You're doing an ROI calculation in your head. Insurance, gas, payment on the car. And you're thinking, do I get that in return? You know, it's that's, it's that simple. But that's what this is the beginning of. It's the beginning of saying, look, are we running a profitable, successful business?

Yeah, there it is. I think the real power, just to follow up and kind of put a bow tie on that, Carrie, is when you take the database calculation, roi, return on investment. You take that and then you tie it to the Emotional stories of the customers. And I think if I could give you guys a silver bullet, that's about as close as you can get to, to a silver bullet of saying, hey, everybody, management C suite. We have a 300% ROI on this program. And by the way, listen to what Carrie Self just said about our product. He's telling all of his friends he's so happy with our service, he calls out three CSMs by name. I mean, that you can't get much better. That is a home run, right? You can prove that the program's generating revenue for the business. You can prove that it's over producing what it costs. And you can show that these. It's having an emotional impact on your customers. I mean, come on, like, what's better than that?

Yeah, I would say mic drop. That was perfect.

Mic drop.

All right, you nailed it.

Let's mic drop it. But yeah, so thanks, guys, again. 60%. Don't calculate the ROI. Try not to be in that 60% bucket. Do everything you can. Just start, as we always say here, just try it. Just start on something and go from there. But don't. Don't be satisfied with not. Don't be satisfied with indifference. That's. That's when you get in really big trouble. So thank you for joining us on another benchmark series. We might do another one of these. We got a couple other benchmarks, but we're gonna start working on that report and get it out to you guys. Thanks for listening, guys. This has been the Account Experience podcast. Thank you to my co host, Carrie T. Self, and we'll talk soon. 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. In Customer Gauge's research with mit, they've found the quickest way to align yourselves with the 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. Yeah, we get a good amount of free Bear 1 login, Iron Mountain, H&R Block, SuperOffice and SugarCRM are already using Customer Gauge to maximize their growth by tying their programs to revenue. 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 from 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 a churn issue. It's not a matter of if, it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge Home helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department, regardless of location, regardless of the vision, 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.