Want That Next Promotion? Start Connecting Drivers to Revenue

Speed, time, effort. And it also does something else other magical. I think it's where we're going with this question. When we're talking about financial. It allows you to connect dollars and cents directly to those.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. I'm here as always with my co host, Kerry T. Self. Say hello, Carrie.

Hello everyone.

And we're going to continue on. Guys, we've been talking to you about the benchmarks episodes. They seem to be getting some great feedback. So we're going to do another one and we got I think maybe like one or two left and then we have a couple cool guests that we're going to throw back into the mix. But today I think we want to talk about one that's pretty shocking. So they're all kind of shocking, but this one's a pretty big one. So the question we asked was, do you know the financial impact that improving drivers will have on your business? And before I get into the stat, Kerry, can you give us a quick run through of, you know, what are drivers? Why are they better than, you know, the standard run of the mill type of surveying, you know, give us that whole lay of the land.

So make this as simple as possible. So nps, right, we, we ask a pretty simple question and everyone sometimes gives NPS a hard time because they think it's too simple and would you recommend us? But you know, all the research, all the data, everything that we look at has proven that if someone's willing to put their reputation online and recommend us and give us a score between 0 and 10, not only do we see future value in that and spend in longevity of a relationship, but we also see a willingness to refer and we talk about referrals all the time. Now once you get that score back though, you want to know why, what drove that score? And that's where the word driver comes from, right? Some companies put an open comment box in there and they have people type in and let's be honest, we see maybe we have actually a high response rate in our comment boxes even with drivers. But some companies are only getting 20, 30% of their customer to actually give comments back. So we have kind of a cascading question waterfall effect with our, with our drivers. And basically what a driver is, is.

You gave me a score whether you loved us, hated us, or anywhere in between. And now I want to know what drove that, what was behind that. Most good companies, and we've talked about this too, is we take our journey, our customer journey map and we map out our drivers based on where we touch our customer. That's what a relationship is about. So if you have a sales department, if you have an implementation or onboarding and you switch over and you do other touches with your customer support product, you bake these in as drivers and it makes the customer's job very easy. I give you this score, and these are the drivers that drove that score. And they can click very easily to tell you why they gave you that, whether it was a positive great score or maybe it's something that we can improve on or focus on that in their relationship and in their perception. So I don't know if I broke that down. Ian, does that make sense to you?

That's perfect. And I think the key piece there was they're not typing something in. They can easily click between all these, what we call primary drivers and secondary drivers, which are, you know, the primary or the big ones like product, service, whatever they are right for your business. And then once you click on product, then it's like ease of use, like it's a level below. So. But there's no manual typing. And I think that's, that's where a lot of companies honestly go wrong is they rely on these open text box and they have to try to gleam sentiment from text analytics and things like that. And it can go, I don't know if you guys have ever used analytics like that. You can go really great or it can go very, very badly. And you don't really know. And that's how you base your decisions, you know, off of that type of data. So, yeah, back to you, Kerry.

But I mean, and I'll throw the disclaimer because I think you hit an important point there.

People think if you don't have these.

Really big comment boxes where people can put a lot of different text in there, you might lose something. And the reality is we find the opposite. If you have to spend time for a human being or even to update your technology to find stuff within that text analytics is only as good as the keywords, the key phrases and the engine that's running that. And that takes a lot of time to get there.

With a driver set, you know your business, you know the parts that you touch with them. With a really good driver set, you save money, you save time, you can get to the important stuff that helps you make strategic decisions quickly. And that's a really key thing, Ian, that you said in there. I mean, speed, time, effort. And it also does something else other magical. I think it's where we're going with this question when we're talking about financial. It allows you to connect dollars and cents directly to those drivers.

Boom. And that's the big reveal, guys. And let's dive into the stat right from there. So again, the question we asked is, do you know the financial impact that improving drivers will have on your business? And we basically gave three options. Yes, calculated in real time, yes via manual analysis, and no, we do not assign revenue drivers or revenue values to drivers. And that's pretty crazy. So 61% of over 1,000 responses. So that's over 600 plus people slash companies. So they don't assign values to drivers. They don't even do that. 30% said they do it via manual analysis and then 8% said they do it in real time. So again, 61% so they don't assign any value to these drivers. So what does that tell us, Kerry?

Why do I keep being shocked on some of this? And I know it's hard. I know we gotta start somewhere.

Yeah.

And again, disclaimer. We're customer gauge. We've, we've figured out a really wonderful way to do this and make it easy for you. But I keep going back to being a business owner. Let's forget whatever my title is, but I'm responsible for the success of my business and I'm going to reach out to my customer base who's spending money with me. I want to keep them, but I also want to know how I can get more money, grow them or hold on to them. And I ask them a question of how I'm doing. Then they're going to click on some drivers to let me know how I am. I can immediately see, I can go to a report and in real time say right now this is the hot topic thing that I need to put my attention on. Could be communications, it could be product, could be training and education, whatever it is, but in real time. And let's take it a step further, Ian. With the right reporting, in the right engine, you can actually see the change. So let's say you do launch an email. Let's say you do do an enhancement to your solution or service. You can see it in real time as that feedback rolls in. Was there an impact? Talk about immediate return on investment on a specific thing that's driving your customer sentiment. I don't know if there's anything more powerful. And when you're talking about 8% of the people who completed this have that insight. 92% of the people already sitting around waiting for a department to deliver their results, or there's a blind spot there. You have no clue that you went out and fixed something or invested in something and if it even had an impact on your business or not.

Yep. Yeah. And I think that's one of the biggest Achilles heels of nps, is that if you just ask for that score, great. Have a general sense for where your customer base is standing with you. You could probably close the loop on some of those, but you have to have those conversations. So why did you, like, promote us? Why are you a detractor? So what went wrong? And you have to do that extra level of discovery, which, again, you should be aiming to make their lives easier, Right? Your customers, your accounts, make their lives, make it easy for them to give you feedback. But also the genius of this whole thing, and I didn't invent it, so I can say that is that not only are you making their lives easier, but you're also making your own internal lives easier. Because you know what to follow up on. I'll tell you guys a story. So I might have told this one before, but it's, like, literally seared into my brain. So every time I think of this, it comes up. I was in charge of my NPS program at a large bank, and I would once a week go to the CEO. Well, it started off once a week, and I learned a pretty severe lesson. The question kept coming up. I'd say, all right, so our NPS here in this division is 60, and our NPS over in this division is 40. And this is what it looks like in segmented and shiny colors. And the CEO praise. I mean, to his credit, always asked, so what? So what? What does that mean? What is that telling me about my business? And I didn't have a fricking answer for him. And it drove me nuts. And I think I've told this before, but it's like, it's so relevant, right? Because if you had drivers, if you knew, you know, how much each account had or how much each account was worth to you, let's put it that way. So how much they paid you for their software or your service, you knew that number. You could overlay that on top of drivers, once they give a piece of feedback, and then all of a sudden, you're looking at it through, all right, well, this driver product is driving a huge amount of detractor value, right? So if, like, the value of the detractor value is 60 million or something like that, you pretty much are certain to think that you should go fix that pretty Darn quick.

Yeah, I love that story.

So what?

Because I remember you telling that one. It's same thing. It seared in my brain and I wasn't even in there. Because we all have that so what moment. Like, okay, MPS is pretty on the surface and it makes us feel good when we can move the number positive a few points. It also makes us feel good when we close the loop and we can solve a few problems. Great story to tell. Right? And listen, if you're not getting majority of your audience to give you feedback and you're not closing the loop with that audience, don't bother with your program. But I'll go a step further. If you're not tying revenue to your program, it's dead in the water. It's almost useless. At least there's a firefighting aspect to it. If at least you're closing the loop and getting back to those people, at least you're doing that level. But so what? Right? And that's what it's about. We all had that moment. You know, going back to my previous life, I remember bringing these numbers in and thinking, why are people not getting more worked up about this? Why are people not concerned? And I had a CEO who says, all right, but what does that mean to me in dollars and cents? Because that's all my investors care about 100%. Sorry, Kerry. Looks good, feels good, but it's no good. And I remember going, crap, I have a challenge here. The day I was able to walk back in and go, if we don't fix this problem, it's going to cost us 1.2 million. And that just so happens to be how much we're down this year already. And the silence in the room and in the moment of like, oh, shit, he did it. Like that's what we have to worry about. And it just speaks a different language and not saying that everything else isn't important. Your customer's voice is very important. Closing the loop and dealing with what it is they specifically need is important. But when you have a large organization that's investing money to make money, you have to answer the quick question fast right now, where can I improve the experience? Where can I grow sales? Where can I make us more profitable? And tying it to drivers is single handedly the best way to do that. It's great to have a customer value, but now if you can tie it to what's driving their sentiment, that's a takeoff point. That's a game changer.

Absolutely. And 61% aren't doing that. So what does that say for the overall experience, Mark? I mean, I can answer that question myself. It's kind of scary, man, because we talk to a lot of companies and they come to us because their program failed or, you know, is about to fail, or their CEO isn't bought in. I mean, the amount of things we see out there, Carrie. And it. It's obvious to us why. We've done a ton of research. I mean, my main job over the last five years has been kicking out, like, why aren't you guys doing this? This is a red flag. Like, get your CEO lined up with the program by talking revenue terms with them. Like, it's not. I don't want to say it's not rocket science, because it's really hard to do. Um, but it's also such a simple concept, right? Like, lead with revenue. Show your revenue impact of your program. This is a main part of it is. Is tying. It's honestly tying revenue to root cause. Like, what is. What is the main point of detraction? What is the main point of promoter. And double down on the promoter side and fix the detractor side, right? Like, it's as simple as that.

I always watch these. These home improvement shows. I'll be honest, I love them, right? They're one of my favorite things to watch being a homeowner and now not being a homeowner and not having to worry about that, but looking to buy one again.

I love when they go in and.

They'Re starting to analyze and go, this is what I want, but this is what I can afford.

And then the person next to them goes, well, this is what we can do to kind of update your house. We'll do five here, 10 here, 20 here. And they start going down that list. And I always think of that as little drivers. These are the drivers that are going to make me happy in my home. But at the end of the day, you have to start making decisions. Where do I invest my money? How much is each of these little improvements worth to me in my overall happiness with a product? And it's that same scenario in that you look at it as little bites here, there, and there. But they make up the whole. They make up the whole. And I just to think that 60% of the people out there with a program of some sort of. Are not tying it to some type of financial way. Wow. I mean, what are you doing then with this feedback? Are you involved at all in the strategic decisions of your company? The answer is no, guys. Sorry. I don't want to hurt anyone's. Feelings here, but you are genuinely don't have a seat at the table.

No.

And anyone who owns this program in their department needs to take inventory quickly and say, how can we link a dollar amount to what feedback is coming in and doing it quickly? And we haven't even talked about the absence of signal and that dollar amount yet. That's a whole nother topic. I know we brushed on it and talked about it, but just by people giving you sentiment and then you can make some really smart decisions on this, right? So if you have a 30, 40% response rate, you can apply that those finances to your whole organization and make some pretty smart assumptions. You know, if you know X amount of dollars, percentage of dollars in this group, you could probably gamble and say majority. Your company feels that way too, because these are your vocal people, these are your spokespersons. So it does give you insight. It will for companies struggling to know, where do we spend time? Where do we spend money? Where do we put people? This is your answer, guys. And I would like to say it's really hard. It's not data drivers. Tie them together. That's what we do, right? And you have your answers in real time. It's not waiting for a month for your finance or your research department to push this stuff out to you. You literally log in. I mean, it's. Imagine account manager or, or like a regional manager could do this for his own department. You know, we segment it. Now you're empowering people on the front line to think the way that the board is thinking. This is where a majority of my dollars are hurting right now. This is what I need to fix. If I can't fix it, I need to go ask for help.

Yep. That's powerful, man. I mean, that's, that's the really good stuff that you'd hope to get out of an experience program, right? I mean, that's, that's where a lot of the insights that you would just wish to have is like, a man, if I fix this, I could save the company $3 million. Like, holy crap. And that's what also the sea level eats up, right? Like, you want to get your buy in locked and loaded and locked down for like the next five years. You show something like that where if we fix this problem, we'll make 5 million bucks and I can track it. The other interesting thing too is like, even if you don't have drivers and you don't have a way to implement those, you don't have cge, right? Like, that's okay. Do it Manually do it with a spreadsheet. I remember one of our customers, I'm not going to mention names, but it's a very large tax accounting firm in the US And Canada. You can find them on our website. But basically, they were doing it manually for themselves, and they were using a spreadsheet. They were tying revenue to nps, they were tying revenue to drivers, and they came on board and started using our system to do it automatically. But I mean, they were doing it manually, which is like a very advanced thing, admittedly to do without a software, but they were doing it, and it was possible. If you have somebody that's good with a spreadsheet, I'm sure that you guys, anybody listening to this can do it today. And you just say, hey, I want to do this. You go and say, figure it out. I'm sure they'll get 80 to 90% this there, if you have the right numbers, the revenue, the data, all that good stuff. So it's not like a hopeless cause. I mean, that 61% of people that aren't doing it, I would challenge half of you to try to figure it out. Like, just go and start, get a spreadsheet, pick up the analyst that is really good at this stuff. Find the data, ask around. I mean, get scrappy with it and see what happens. And if that, for example, proves that, that it's valuable, then the next conversation is, how do we automate it? Right? I mean, that's. You start manually, you show the value and say, wow, I can actually show that there's revenue tied to specific drivers in the business. And then the next thing that you do is you automate. You don't have to start with automation. I know it's a weird thing coming from a software company, but just start doing it the right way. That's all we care about. I think that's. We want these programs to be successful regardless of whether or not you're our client. I think that's, that's why we do this stuff. We're passionate about it. I mean, what are your thoughts on that, Gary?

That's a really great point. So I love the fact that we keep saying, start somewhere, do something, even if it is manual. And, you know, again, how many of us have grabbed a spreadsheet and just punch data in. And if anyone that needs help, join my podcast later. Pivot tables with Excel. No, I'm kidding.

What a rager.

That'll be crazy. But seriously, I mean, I know what those customers are worth somewhere. I have that data, and I know at least the top level of what it is they're loving or hating about me. There you go. There's your table. There's your horizontal and vertical. You've already created that. Run a pivot table on that, and you can start grouping together by what they mentioned. I mean, I think it's a really good point, Ian, that, yes, at the.

End of the day, we sell our.

Services, we sell our solution, and yes, hopefully we make it easier for people, a lot easier. But, okay, you're not ready for us yet. Get started. Do something. I think that's been our message here for weeks. Just because you don't have the perfect.

Solution, you can start somewhere, start figuring it out. And I think even in that journey, you'll start to realize the value in it, and you'll get something out of that.

Exactly. And I think that's important is going through that journey. Nobody starts. And I say this to a lot of people, nobody starts at level 10 out of 10. 10, you know, like, they start at level one and they work their way up. We have an assessment on our website that will help you understand what are the different steps. Like, you can literally start on level one, which is what we call foundations, where you're literally just sending out surveys, you're measuring the feedback, and eventually, as you get better at these things and as you get a process and a team in place, you can get to that level of tying revenue to drivers. But we feel like this is one of the most important things that we can portray, Relate to you guys, is tying revenue to your program, whether it be drivers, whether it be nps. Like, just start doing it. I don't care what it is. But if you're not reporting on revenue, like you said, Carrie, they're going to be not interested at worst. And so what at best? I mean, it's kind of a tough spot to be.

Yeah.

Again, I know it's so cliche, but show me the money.

Yeah, show me the money. Jerry McGuire.

So, great point. So again, we're gonna say this over and over again. We continue to repeat this, but it's almost that trifecta of feedback, customer value. Now we put that driver in there.

And at the end of the day.

I can't tell you how many programs take off when they hit this point.

And actually show themselves up. This is where I think we really see departments and companies take off, adding resources. And you said something earlier, too.

It's true.

There's that moment where you say, I can save us or I can make us this much Money. And let me show you why. And here it is. And at the end of the day, that's what every CEO COO VP is waiting for. Someone to walk into the office and say, let me show you where the money's at.

So true. You want a career maker, There it is. I mean, that's the other thing we've talked about in the past too is like the people that figure this out, it's great for them because they get promoted like crazy. And I can give you hundreds of examples of our previous champions that have been promoted. Kind of sucks for us because then we got to find previous new champions. But it's great to see, right? Because they get it, the business gets it, they're reporting on the right things. Revenue, then nps, you know, they get it and the business understands that. They get rewarded, they get promoted. A lot of them are C levels themselves now. But again, it all is related, it's all important. But man, 61% of you guys are not assigning revenue to drivers. So we hope this was helpful. There should be a good amount of tips in this thing. If you want to reach out to Kerry, I'm sure he'd love to talk to you about it all day long. He's doing that literally all day long in the academy right now. So this is Customer Engage Academy. Go to customer engage.com you can find it. But this is what we chat about in there is honestly how do you improve your program? How to get you from the foundations level to measure, to act, to grow, which tying revenue is usually grow stage. But that's the mission we're on. We want to improve every single person's program. Doesn't matter where you are in the world, how big or small you are, we want to be there to help you. And I think that's truly part of CG Academy's mission. Karen and I know that you feel very strongly about that. So thanks for listening guys. It's been a great episode. Hopefully you got some value out of it. Please like and share with your friends. Catch us on LinkedIn and we'll talk to you all 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.

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