Driving Business Growth & Innovation with Best Selling Author, Tiffani Bova | Salesforce

Well, thank you so much for spending some time with me this afternoon. But more importantly, thank you so much for spending the day with us here at World Tour London. It's a pleasure for me to spend the afternoon with you. As you can tell by my accent, I'm not from here, but I spend quite a bit of time in region. London is one of my favorite cities to visit. So I hope you will enjoy this session that I'm going to be talking about building your growth IQ muscle. So without further ado, let me start from the beginning. I like to frame this conversation with the fact that growth and comfort never coexist. This was a quote from Ginny Rometty, the CEO of IBM. It's a shortened version of a much longer quote, but the whole concept behind this was she knew she was going to be taking that company on a long term journey from a hundred billion dollar business, shedding massive businesses, thinking about how do we reimagine and transform what we sell, how we sell, who our customers are and ultimately what kind of company IBM was going to be in five years. At the end of the day, she has been on a rapid journey towards doing that. And I will tell you when she made this quote, at the time, 27 quarters had gone by with no growth. So can you imagine you're the CEO of a multi billion dollar company, publicly traded and you have not had one quarter of growth in almost three years. So you have to think about what does that mean and what is the reason that many businesses are facing this issue. One of the most vexing challenges businesses have today of all sizes is growth. It's thinking about what does that mean? Not all growth is good growth. And when I talk about growth today, I want to be really clear. I'm talking about top line growth, the growth at the top of the funnel, the sales. Not cutting costs for growth and not looking for M and A for growth. But the truth of the matter is that only a very small percentage of companies ever get larger than $5 million. So if you're one of those businesses that has been fortunate enough to cross that plateau, know that you're in an elite club. Remember, There is only 100 FTSE companies and there's only 1,000 Fortune 5000 and there's only 500 Fortune 500s. The mass of the business happens in small and mid. But what happens when you are a 1 million, 2 million, 5 million, 100 million dollar company is you tend to get a little focused on being bigger from a revenue perspective, especially when you're not publicly traded. And so you have to think differently about growth. And think about it from, how do I build a business that's consistent, that's consistent in profitability, consistent in its margins, consistent in delivering a compelling service and experience to your customers? That's what business is all about. It isn't only about growing at the top line, but we get very fixated on it. But the truth is that 80% of businesses all up will face what I call a growth stall at some point in their history. Which means at some point you're going to go, we're growing, we're growing, we're growing. We're not growing as much, we're not growing as much. All of a sudden we start to flatten out, and then we start to decline. There was a statistic out for the Fortune 500 a number of years back that showed that a very small percentage actually grew in that year, yet they were still Fortune 500 companies. So growth is getting harder for small, for medium, and for large. But what we have to remember always is if it's getting harder to grow, if it's one of the hardest challenges, if people are not able to crack that $5 million ceiling that it takes two to four years to recover from a growth stall. So the trick here is to get the intelligence, make sure you have some systems and processes in place and metrics to identify. Are we approaching what I would call a growth stall? Are there things we could be doing ahead of time? You don't just show up one day in a growth stall. There are external influences that may impact that, but ultimately it's a journey towards this stall that you think we're growing now, we're just going to keep growing and nothing is going to come between us and growth. But that is not the reality, because 80% of you will find yourself in a growth stall. You have to figure out, how do I get myself out of it? Where do I begin? Where do I start to look for areas of improvement to ensure, number one, I don't find myself in a growth stall. But that's highly unlikely. It probably will happen. But number two, if you find yourself in a growth stall, how do you actually recover? And I will tell you that many people start to focus externally, they look outside the company to say, what can I do to grow? When in reality, we all as individuals have to be open and adaptable to change. We have to make sure we're willing and open to say, look after everything I've heard today at World Tour London, after all the things I've learned On trailhead. After all the things I'm capable of doing and all these new insights I'm able to capture because of artificial intelligence and machine learning, am I willing to step up and change? And when I went on this journey to think about what was it I wanted to write in a book and I came up with this concept of growth iq, I didn't just decide that I was going to write some new formula, some new foundation, some new framework. I said to myself, let me take everything I know businesses have been doing for the last hundred plus years and let's modernize it to the fact that we now have more power in our hands than we ever had 10 years ago. I tweeted something the other day that our most powerful computer we own today is actually our car. It tracks where we go, it tracks how fast we drive, it tracks what restaurants we go to, it tracks our favorite locations. It knows where we live, it knows where our family live. If you put it into favorites, it knows what you've done in the last 24 hours and even goes so far as to know if you've gained weight because it can tell from the seat. So I like to joke that the day my car just automatically drives me to the gym because I've gained a little too much weight, you know that it's time to start walking. But ultimately, the most powerful thing we have right now, computer wise, is that car. And so how do we change the way we behave and modernize some of those growth strategies that we've had in the past? And that really landed me on what I found to be these 10 paths to growth. There should be nothing on this growth IQ map that you don't recognize. And that was really the purpose. The purpose was to say what you've been doing will continue to work, but we need to look at it through a new lens. The first thing I tell you, where you need to start when you're thinking about, how do I want to either double down on growth, recover from a stall, or continue the momentum that I have going already is. You have to start with the context of the market. Meaning who are your customers today? Why did they buy from you? Who chose not to buy from you? Why didn't they buy from you? Why are your customers leaving you? What are your competitors doing? What's happening from a regulation standpoint? If you're in an industry, what's happening in government? Will Brexit have impact to you? What does that mean to the way that you do manufacturing, where you're doing it? Are you bringing in trade from other countries, will that be impacted? Really, looking across the landscape to say what are the things that I need to be aware of externally and internally in my company before I make a decision on how I want to grow the business. But in all the research I did leading up to publishing the book, I found this one big aha moment, which was the one thing about growth is it's never one thing. And because of that, you have to not only understand, here are the 10 growth paths, here's the context of the market that I'm competing in, the products I have, the services I have and the customers that I have, but now you need to think about what's the combination of those growth paths I want to do simultaneously. And this is the power. The power is the fact that no one growth path sits alone. It will always be combined with another. What you choose along the way is what makes you competitive. And I will tell you that when I was doing the research for the book and looking across companies from around the world of all sizes, this was one of the foundations of their secret sauce. So if you copy someone's marketing campaign or you replicate the way they sell, or you replicate the products, you. You're only focused on one of the things that they're doing. And the other part of the aha moment for me, and really what was the secret sauce for many of those businesses is the sequence and order in which they did it. So I'm going to pick Netflix as an example. We all know the story that Netflix really did a great job of disrupting Blockbuster in the United States. But had Netflix launched streaming first in the US would they have been successful at the time they launched their product? We did not have a smartphone in our hand with the power to do all the things it was doing. WI Fi was not ubiquitous. The cost of having high speed Internet in your home was unrealistic. But what they did know is that every household almost had a DVD or VHS player in their house. So they said, let's start where we know the consumer actually wants to enjoy entertainment and let's fix the parts of it that we felt were driving friction in the experience between the brand and the customer. And so they eliminated the late fee problem. They said, you don't have to worry about coming to a video store and not having your movie available to you or you go home with a box and it's the wrong movie inside. Which was always very frustrating. But then you'd leave it in your backseat and days would go by and you'd be charged Almost as much as if you had just bought it on your own. And so when they came to Europe, they then said, well, hold on a second. Years have gone by. What is the context of the market? Well, people have the power of the smartphone, they have WI Fi. People now are willing to stream. And so we're just going to launch with the streaming service. That's what I mean by sequence. The order in which you choose to do things has huge implications in your ability to actually be successful. Uber's another one. If nobody had a smartphone, how successful would they have been? Not very successful. So you have to think about the order in which you do it has incredible implications to the success. So those are the three big things. It is the context of your market, it's the combination of paths that you do, and it's the order and the sequence in which you choose to do it. Now, this platform of which I wanted to build the story around for growth IQ was this one comment that customers will remember the experience they have with a brand or a person much longer than the price that they paid. And so I'm just going to use my experience this morning. So I was standing on the corner to come here, said, I'll call an uber. It was 1.4x for a surcharge and it was going to be 15 minutes. So it told me all that information. So I said, no, I'm going to cancel. I'm going to hop in a black cab. The drive was 45 minutes. The driver was fantastic, very pleasant. We had a great time, we laughed. It was fun. I don't remember what I paid for the cab ride. I remember the experience that I had as I was driving here. And I would say that was probably one of the better experiences I've had in a black cab in a while. And so maybe next time on my way home today, instead of calling an Uber, I'll hop in the back of a black cab again. And what has happened around experience is that we have also said that we will use customer experience as a competitive differentiator. Experience is now one of the top conversations CEOs are having at the board level. You hear it talked about more and more in earnings calls. People are saying, we're now pivoting towards the customer. We want to embrace everything that they're doing and make sure we're delivering those services. And so many brands are actually emphasizing customer experience over the products that they sell. And then we as consumers are saying, you know what? Not only do we want a better experience and we will pay more For a better experience, whether it's a hotel room or a cab ride or an airline ticket or a restaurant or a meal, we all make a decision every single day to make a choice on a brand, even if it's more expensive, because of the experience that we have. And we also see that those that are more focused on customer experience grow exponentially faster than those who don't. If you're just product led, the customer feels as if you're not paying attention to them. So we want to make sure that you keep in mind that the customer should be at the center of all the decisions that you make. They should be your true north. Every decision you make should have a customer behind it. And we now say that for those of you who sell B2C versus those that sell B2B, that behind the consumer decisions, the business owners and business leaders, you guys are actually saying that you want a heightened experience when you're in the B2B environment. So the examples that I gave were very B2C. But I want you to think that we are all consumers when we're buying in our business, clothing during the day, when we're working. And our expectations are, look, when I'm at home, I have this certain experience, but when I'm at work, I have another experience, which I think because I'm at work, I want it to actually be better. So don't get confused that the examples that you hear are consumer oriented. And you sell B2B because you are always selling it into a consumer. And the more complex that sale is, the challenge that you have is you are sitting across from four or five consumers, and they all have very different expectations, they have very different interests in the agenda that they're trying to push forward. So if all that is true, we're now competing on customer experience, that ultimately this is what we're faced with when it comes to growth. Sales is becoming harder. Selling every day, trying to capture interest from new customers, keeping them engaged and interested through their buying journey is really getting more difficult. And the reason sales is becoming harder is because these expectations are higher. It's the number one top sales challenge in our research is that the expectations are higher. And so sales is getting harder. The top focus area for our chief marketing officers in our state of marketing research was getting closer to customers. Is the top goal, the top challenge, getting closer to customers. From a sales perspective, it's always about meeting these customer expectations. So now how do you do that? How do you do that? So I will tell you that optimizing sales is an enormous opportunity for you. And there are a couple reasons. One, as I said, customers are more willing to pay more money for a frictionless experience. And they want it to be simple, as easy as buying a book online. The reason Marc Benioff, if you've read the book behind the Cloud, started the company was I want to make consuming and purchasing enterprise grade software as easy as buying a book online. And everyone has used that as a platform to try and replicate the recommendation engine, how simple it is for you to consume. How many of you have purchased from Amazon in the last 30 days? So the next question is how many of you went through training to learn how to purchase on Amazon? It's a trick question. You didn't get trained because why? Very easy. You can figure out how to navigate through that in a seamless way. But most of us are not happy with our conversion rates. This says 22% of businesses are satisfied. That means 78% of us are not satisfied with our conversion rates. So for the marketers in the room, that means your salespeople are saying they're not happy with the leads. For the salespeople, they're saying we need to have better opportunity to close business and convert leads. And when you ask executives what's important to them, optimized sales is at the top of the list for 44% of them because we just can do a better job. And 54% of sales organizations unfortunately do not align with their collective customer facing organizations. So I'm going to say in that specifically customer service, marketing and sales. So let me just dig into why I think optymyze sales is an untapped opportunity for you. There's a couple of stats I'm going to rattle off here. One is quota attainment has gone down around the globe five years in a row, quota attainment has gone down more than 50% of your sales force. Two words. Your sales teams will miss quota. They're expecting to miss quota. The third stat is more than 60% of their time is spent on non selling activities. So let's wrap that back up. If you have 10 salespeople, 100 salespeople, a thousand salespeople, half of them are telling you they're going to miss their number. If you have 10 salespeople, 100 or 1,000, 66% of their time is spent on non selling activities, quota attainment has gone down for five straight years. So when you're looking for growth, what's the first thing many of us do? Let's hire another sales rep. Because with Every head we add, we know in two to three months, we're going to get X amount of revenue, another 100,000, 200,000 million dollars, whatever the number is. So I'm just going to keep hiring sales reps when I start to see a softness in the market. That's one thing you do. The second thing you might do is I'm going to spend more marketing money, because if I can get more leads into the funnel, then we have a higher likelihood of actually closing business and meeting quota. Or the third thing that you do is you start to cut costs, which impact ultimately the experience and the service that brands have with you. So instead of doing one of those three things, what could we do to actually optimize the sales force you already have? Because if you can peel 5%, 10% off of that 60% number of them not spending time selling and apply that time to selling, what happens to the quota wasn't rhetorical. Anybody, it should go up because they're spending more time selling. So focusing in on how do I take things off the plate of a seller that is not oriented towards selling. And then you may say, well, hold on, how do I do that? Some of it is people in process. Some of it is you're not taking advantage of all the things technology actually gives you, which tends to be more of the reason. Third could be that your sales reps are refusing to actually engage with technology in order to make their lives easier, because they feel like Big Brother is watching them in everything they're doing from a productivity standpoint. So they tend not to want to engage with the technology. But whatever the reason may be, you have to find a way to overcome that inertia, because those are internal factors that are actually driving this challenge. And so when you think about becoming more optimized from a selling perspective, you have to make this pivot from moving from being very product centric to being very customer centric. And the way you become customer centric is implying this intelligence in a very systematic way. Always make sure you're looping back from the customer that you have to the customers you've lost to the customers you're trying to get to the context of the market. What are the things you should be focused on from a growth perspective to make sure you're pulling all that together to say, okay, what are the things I need to combine in order to make myself successful? So let me be really clear. These first two paths should be part of your combination strategy always, because you want to make sure you're delivering a Compelling experience, and you want to make sure you're optimized from a selling perspective. The third place for you to focus after those two is customer base penetration. This was really fascinating to me because so many businesses have this base of customers that you've spent a lot of money and time in acquiring your customer. Acquisition cost is high, and so why is it that we ignore that customer base when we go looking for growth? It costs six to seven times more money to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. So I was traveling on a flight in the US and it was maybe an hour flight. I was sitting next to this gentleman. We started talking about growth, and he had a small textile manufacturing business in Los Angeles, California. And I said, tell me a little bit about your business. I said, how many customers do you have? He goes, I have 100,000 customers. I said, my gosh, that's fantastic. How many customers have bought from you in the last 90 days? I don't know. How many customers spend more than $100 with you a year? I don't know. And I asked him a series of five or six questions. He was the CEO. He actually had no idea what the answer was. He said, my growth strategy is to do a deal with two very large online retailers. That's my growth strategy because we're pouring all of our energy into that. And I said, well, what about the 100,000 customers that you already have, that you've already acquired, that have already said to you, we like you, we trust you, we enjoy your product, we've bought from you multiple times, but you don't treat me like you know who I am. And ultimately the probability to sell to that existing base is significantly higher. 60 to 70% of your existing customers will buy from you. Again, where 5 to 20% is selling, the likelihood of selling to a new customer, Remember, the conversion rates are in the 20s. Interesting. It's about the same. Converting that new customer is getting harder and harder because the expectations are getting higher and higher. And oh, by the way, repeat customers on average spend 67% more with you. Now, this isn't just a recurring revenue as a service game. I don't care if you're selling donuts in a corner store. If someone comes and buys croissants from you on Sunday for their family, how do you get them to buy them on Wednesday for their team meeting? How do you get them to come one more time, buy one more house, refer you one more piece of business? Ultimately, it is the right way for you to look for that new revenue stream and that loyal customer is irreplaceable. Let me just say to you that I think your greatest sales engine is your existing customers advocating on your behalf. And I would say I've been here at Salesforce three and a half years. Prior to joining Salesforce, I was a research fellow at Gartner for a decade. And before that, I ran sales, service and marketing and tech for almost 15 years. And I can tell you that nobody does it better than Salesforce. Masterful at having customers tell the story of how the technology has helped them grow, engage, become more productive, and in some cases, just socially do such great work for their communities around the world. That's the way you tell the story now. I told you growth was getting harder. I told you these are the ways in which companies have grown. But when I travel around the world, I often hear the reason we're not growing is something out here, out in the ether. I can't see it, I can't touch it, but I know something's going on. There's no way it could be us that's actually stopping ourselves from growing. But the statistics and research show that that is not true. This is a study from Bain where 85% of the executives in companies larger than 5 billion said that internal, not external, obstacles keep their companies from growing profitably. Internal obstacles, not something that's happening in the regulations. It's what they're doing and the decisions that they're making internally. Remember the context, the growth path, the combination, the sequence, optimizing selling, knowing who your customers are, taking advantage of the base you've already built. That alone is a growth engine for you. What happens externally is interesting in the context conversation, but should not paralyze you to not make the right decisions for your business. And so for me, ultimately, growth is a thinking game. There's no question that if you can outthink your competition and take into consideration these things I've just told you, you have a much better opportunity to be successful. So the first thing I start with is you have to begin with this beginner's mind. I don't want you to forget everything you know. I want you to bring everything you know with you. But I want you to be open and willing to say, maybe there's things we could be doing differently about how we manage our teams, how we're organized, how we connect each other. What, what are our key performance indicators? What are our metrics? How are we managing people? What are we thinking about when it comes to growth? Pull that together with your Experience and then come up with your story on what are the ways that you can grow in the future. The second is making sure that you map yourself against the context. I often see companies try to replicate what someone else is doing, and they don't realize that they don't even have that customer base. They don't have that product line, they don't have that brand, they don't have that logo. They don't have anything else that that competitor has. But they go out there and try to replicate it. And that's what I mean by context. Don't chase that. Perceived competition. Who you think you're competing with may not be who your customers think you compete with, because in many ways, you're competing against yourself. The way you used to do things, the way you used to hire, who you used to hire, how you used to train. Remember this internal inertia becomes a great hurdle for you to overcome. The next is to combine those paths. Make sure you pick the right paths. It's not you pick once and you're done. You always have to be refreshing to say, has the context changed? Am I doing it in the right combination? Have I done it in the right sequence? And so once a year, annual planning leaves you exposed for the fact that you may have 3/4 where you weren't paying attention. And all of a sudden, a year later, you're starting to see yourself in a growth stall. And the next is you have to believe that your differentiation is your mental model, how you do things, not what you do. Someone can replicate what you do when, but they can't replicate how you do it. Your culture, your people, are yours. And then the last thing I'd say on this is empower each other and customers. It has to start with you. If you're not willing to go through this change and do the hard work and make suggestions and get a little uncomfortable, then it's all for naught. So I would say to you, I'm going to leave you with this. So what will you do differently? Will you change something? And what will that be? Based on what you heard here today, in the keynotes, in the breakout sessions, in this session, in the others you attend, Ultimately, if you've come and spent a day with us, it means you're investing in your company's future. And it isn't just about the technology. For me, the people and process side of this entire journey of transformation is far more impactful. Technology can enable it. People are the ones that power it. At the end, I want you to just be bold do something that makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable. Do something that maybe you didn't think you'd ever do in a business environment, even if you've tried it before, maybe try it again. You have to be willing to really spread your wings and get out there and go for growth. So with that, I will leave you with this last slide. We've got a ton of research out there@salesforce.com research, state of sales, state of marketing, state of customer service. We've got industry research, we've got the connected customer telling you what's happening to help shape the context. We have it regionally split. So we've got uk, Germany, Spain. We've got other parts of Europe as well as the world. We've got a great presentation up on SlideShare called the Future of Sales that I put out about eight months ago. We're going to be refreshing that in a little bit. And then we have the book Growth iq. So for those of you who have attended the session today, there's actually a copy of the book for you to pick up on your way out the door that I hope you appreciate and enjoy. So I just want to thank you for your time and attention and remember that the backbone of corporate growth is personal growth. And with that, I leave you. Thank you so much for your time.