Gain the Advantage by Leveraging the Voice of Your Customer - Mark Allen Roberts

Voice of the customer. What does the customer have to say about your business? A lot of problems could be fixed if we actually just knew what the customer was thinking about us in our business, about their world, about their problems. Hey, everybody, my name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling coach and host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with something to do with growing your business, how to grow it, how to get the people right, dialing in the strategy, executing better the cash model and your leadership. You'll find one of our many 500 plus back catalog of shows@scalingcoach.com or wherever you're getting this right now. LinkedIn, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTubes, whatever. We like to be everywhere. So, like subscribe, turn on your notifications wherever you are and get them in your thing. Or go to scalingcoach.com where you can find about our programs, our workshops, things like that. I just did a workshop this week with Vern. We did a master class. We had hundreds of people in. Super cool. All the things was Scaling Up. All that kind of stuff you'll find at our website, scalingcoach.com so I'm joined now by Mark Allen Roberts. I love the three first names, Right?

You know, unfortunately, the world's most famous streaker is named Mark Roberts. So in no way does that help me.

I gotta distinguish a little bit.

My mother. My mother is very happy that I'm using my middle name. Yes.

Right. So listen for our audience. He's also Scaling Up Coach in our world. His website is no Smoke and Mirrors, which I love. Like plain speaking, real value, good stuff. And he's particularly passionate about this Voice of the customer. He spoke about it at one of our past Scaling up summits. And I thought it'd be great to go a little deeper, have him share some of the stories here with this audience. So welcome to the show, Mark.

Oh, thanks for having me. And again, I enjoyed your sharing at the conference as well.

Thanks. So in your world, we're talking about Voice of the Customer. That really means looking at, talking with, understanding your customer. We're going to get into all that talk about how do you come to the world of coaching, your business background, that kind of thing.

Sure.

How do we get to this moment in time?

Back in the late 80s, early 90s, I was helping a company, a plastics manufacturing company. And to our CEO's credit, he wanted us in the field, asking questions. Right. I had a sales team. At one point, I had 68 sales reps out there doing their jobs. But my job was to go out and ask questions, find new markets, find unresolved market problems. And we would turn those into new products, new services. And that little company went from under 10 million when I started, and we sold it for 300 million. So once you've done that, it's in your blood. I can't stop it. It's like I'm on vacation on a cruise, and my wife says, stop it. You're interviewing that guy. He's just somebody at our table. But everybody has challenges, right? And unfortunately, most salespeople do what I call pitch slapping, right? They assume you have a problem. They go out and they start pitching you. Now, the approach should be ask really good questions, try to have, like, some worthy intent, and actually care about the other person and help them solve their problem.

It's funny how, like, I think so much is solved, actually, with one simple word. Maybe that's a book I should write. Curiosity.

Yes, curiosity. It certainly top performing salespeople have a natural curiosity.

Yeah. So after you grew that, you. You did that. How long have you been coaching?

Oh, since 2000. When we sold that business, I immediately hung up my shingle and said, if I could do that for one company, I could do it for several. And, like, a lot of coaching mistakes, every time I would start helping another company, they're like, tell you what, we want you full time. So then I would go work for them full time, and then I'd get their system up and running. In five to six years, I'd move on to the next company. But right after the plastics company, I jumped right into another company that needed to scale in Scottsdale, Arizona. So it was a lot of fun. They made handicapped vehicles so people in wheelchairs could drive again. I mean, talk about the best job in the world, right? I'm not filling landfills with plastic. I'm helping people get their lives back together.

Right?

But kind of like a lot of companies I went in, they were stalled under about just under 10 million. I asked the leadership team a bunch of questions, and they really knew a lot about their product, how technically advanced it was, their dealers, but they didn't really know much about people in wheelchairs. So back then, I hit the road, and for six months, I went out and interviewed consumers in wheelchairs. And it was fascinating. And I'll never forget, I just shared this on a webinar with Vern in Akron, Ohio. A gentleman in the lobby says, you know, you folks aren't all that smart. I said, okay, you've got my attention. He says, why do you make such an expensive vehicle. Why don't you just convert used vehicles and take like 15,000 off the retail? And I got like, that is so smart. Why aren't we doing it right? We went back today, 70% of vehicles in that market are used vehicles that were converted. That company went from under 10 million. Six years later was sold for 90 million. We also got other insights, right? Like we asked people, why did you buy our product? There's three other people in the market. What they all said was, it was quiet. If you grew up in a wheelchair in a vehicle, traditionally the ramp was in the vehicle with you rattling all the way down the road, right? This company had the ramp disappear into the floor. It's like I could actually have a conversation. I could listen to the radio. Nowhere in their website, their brochures, their training, did they say anything about taking a quiet ride. So we started Take a quiet ride campaign. Yeah, I couldn't have come up with that.

I love that. So you're talking to people that are actually using the product and you hear the thing that everybody wishes you'd do, right? And that actually becomes a really important part of the business. And then you hear who you actually are for them and what they value. And it's not something you even talk about. And that becomes an important message. So often we're like, okay, well, we're going to come up. These are our brand promises and this is the business we're in. Be like. And although you might be in the ballpark, you'll say them and talk about them, write about them in ways that are just not credible with the customer. They're not the way the customer would talk about them, or not necessarily the things that they actually value. No, we came to you because of this, and we don't really like that about you.

Well, I even had one of their customers tell me, you know, and it kind of disturbed me. It was a young lady. She says, from what I gather, you think people in wheelchairs are pretty ugly. He says, look at all your ads. Everybody in a wheelchair isn't a wheelchair bound person. We don't have scuffs on the bottom of our shoes. We don't have muscle tone in our legs. You're using models. Are you saying that our community is ugly? From that day, we started using real people in wheelchairs and it made a huge difference. We didn't even think, you know, we were trying to have a really good ad shot with a really nice visual image. And you know what? We really appreciate the customers holding us accountable.

That's a really great insight. Yeah. Subtle things like that didn't even occur to you. We've had on Brian Smith in the past talking about founding the Ugg shoe company. Right? Ugg boots. And he's like, yeah, in the beginning we did these ads and then we went and talked to surfers and they're like, those are ridiculous. You have stupid models. They don't know anything about surfing. They're like fake. And like, he's like. We were like, oh, my God.

We got it wrong. I've made it part of the process. My book launched in June. I called it Driving Explosive Growth. And the first thing we need to do is understand your current state. And we do that by interviewing your customers. There's all kinds of versions of truth going on in your company. You and I both know when we talk to the CEO, they have a version of truth, right? We talk to the senior management team, they have a version of truth. Mid level managers, frontline workers. But I can get my most insights talking to your customers.

You know, like, all perspectives are valuable, right. Like they're all possible ways and places of looking at the world and assessing things. And yet as a business, among the most important is the customers. Right. Like, you can't get their perspective wrong.

I was helping a training company out of Scottsdale called Pragmatic Marketing, and they had a. They actually made a coffee cup and they sold them because they were so popular. The coffee cup says your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant. Other words. Yeah, everybody in your business has an opinion, but until you validate that in the marketplace that people value it.

Right. It's not necessarily that compelling or interesting or whatever. Yeah, there's a. There's a favorite old story and like ancient, many thousands of years old story about the blind men and the elephant. And not a lot of folks in North America know this story or even Western Europe, but blind men are taken to see, quote, unquote, an elephant for the first time. And they all lay their hands on a different part of the elephant, describing it differently, each of them, because they touch the tusk, the trunk, the legs, the ears, like different parts, and they're all 100% correct. And yet they're all completely different. And in some tellings of the story, they get so angry with each other for being wrong that they, they come to blows. They fight about it. Right. And wars are literally fought this way because I see the world differently, especially around belief, but worldview and lots of things like that. Right. And it's remarkable, like how we do that and yet we don't realize. Yeah, you're, you're actually right. But so are they.

Well, and a lot of the people I help are family run businesses, traditionally manufacturers or service businesses. And their version of truth is often dated. It's dated from what their father might have taught them, their grandfather maybe when they were in the field selling, but it was. Think of how much your business has changed since the pandemic. Why would we assume our customers. Businesses haven't changed?

Yeah, yeah, they're all changing all the time.

Right.

Like it's all shifting. We leaned into the pandemic. We did really well and our clients did really well. And then the next year, like, things started to shift again. And I feel like even now we're still settling through different periods, trying to figure out who the hell we are in the world and we've got these global conflicts going on and like.

The.

Whole landscape continues to change and evolve.

Well, luckily we've had a number of clients want voice of customer right now as they get into 2024. And no matter what industry, whether it's metals, I have a client that does robotic welding. I have people in the building and supply industry. We're kind of hearing the same thing as we interview their buyers. Look, we were crazy busy. If you had it, we were buying it during the pandemic. If we wanted 7,500, we ordered 10,000, assuming you wouldn't ship it. And guess what? We also ordered 10,000 from your competitor, assuming they wouldn't ship it. Well, guess what? Everybody's caught up. So now we're trying to pass this pig through the python.

Right.

They've got a ton of inventory, their orders are slow, and their leaders are saying, wait a minute, I like the growth we had during the pandemic. What's going on?

Yeah.

But when we interview them, we find that we just need to adjust how we're selling today.

Yeah, yeah. The first company you were talking about was Alpha Enterprises, Right. Is that correct?

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

That grew in that way. And then you did the, the, the van company, right?

Yeah, that was a company called Vantage Mobility out of Arizona.

Yeah. And, and that's the. Yeah, I see it. I'm looking at, at our show notes for the prep here. The, the training company. Talk about that.

Yeah, it's the number one training company in the world for product managers, teaching them how to design, identify and build products consumers want to buy heavy. In the tech industry, They've trained over 80,000 vice presidents of product management. Right. They brought me in to launch a new division called Tuned Up. They wrote a book called Tuned Up. I'm a chapter in that book. I wrote all the content. And then the recession hit. Just like a lot of their clients, all of a sudden their on site training business dried up. And the CEO came to me and said, look, it's really not a good time to launch a new division, but I could use your help.

Yeah.

So we use the process. We called their, all their clients. We found out what had been changing, what happened. And prior to the recession, a human resources person could cut a check for $60,000 without approval. During the recession, the CFO had to approve that. And their first answer is always no. So we were counting on the HR person to be a salesperson in their organization. What we kept hearing was, give me tools so I can sell internally. Would you be willing to speak with our power and our decision makers? So we created basically a slide deck to help HR leaders talk about the value of training their people. And then we invited ourselves and invited power onto our calls earlier in the process. And within about three months we were doing what we were doing prior to the recession. And after six months, we were actually doing more revenue during a recession than we did prior to the recession.

You know, I. It seems like the insights, it seems so obvious and easy. And yet time and again, when we come to this with clients as we're coaching, I find a lot of them are like, yeah, let's just, I just want to do this right now and we'll do that research later. And I'm like, you could get this done. I mean, there are obviously layers and levels of voice of customer work that you could do. You could call a few this week and get some insights. You could send out an email, you could do a survey, you could visit them all. Many ways to get their perspective on things, but taking the time to actually go hear what they have to say about their world, their situation, their problem, their needs. Your company, your products and services, your competition, that's gold. But I think the resistance is I'm really busy right now and I already think I know.

And it sounds like an awful lot of work, Mark.

Yeah.

And that's why I actually created a side business where we do the interviews for you.

Right. For them.

A current client, you know, I can't mention the name of their company because of the NDA, but they make very large industrial machines. They're sold for anywhere between $1.52 million. They were getting ready to go into 2024. I says, look, I Want to talk to your customers? Well, we know our customers. Really? Who knows your customers? Our salespeople. Our salespeople are supposed to know our customers. As I want to talk to your customers. What are your salespeople telling you? Oh, 2024 is going to be a tough year. 2024 is going to be so slow. I'm like, okay, well, let's just talk to your customers.

Yeah.

Their plan before I did the voice of customer research was we were going to chase new logos. Right. We were going to go out and try to find new business. After the research, 30% of their current customers plan to buy another machine in 2024. I helped them with their strategic plan and nowhere on their plan did they have calling our existing accounts. And it gets even better. Not only do we call your current customers, we talk to your inactive customers. People that bought but haven't bought in a while. People that you quoted and did not win. Right. 40%. 4. 0 of the people they quoted in 2024 that they assumed bought a machine from a competitor had done nothing and they planned to buy one in 2024. It totally shifted how we're going to go to market. Yeah, yeah, but that's a real example that we're working on right now. We're working on their one page plan. Our entire go to market strategy shifted after the research that we did.

That's fascinating. In our past business for me, we came out of the 20089 recession and started to have some breakout products that were doing really well. And we saw an opportunity to update our brand and to continue to do these new products and expand in new stores. But we were like, well, we need to understand better in their world, like who we are for them. We sent a couple people out to actually go meet with interview where I mean, they did some remote, but a lot of them, they went to the person's home, the end user. So we were selling fashion jewelry and we're like, we have the people who buy from us and then we have the end user, the wearer of the thing. So we were selling mostly through. Not direct at that time, very little direct, but selling mostly through retailers and catalogs. And. And so we went to meet with these people and we came to call them collectors later collectors. And we identified super fans within that. We found the people who are really passionate about the product. And we went to understand, like, you know, how do you feel about this and why and how does it compare to other things that you own and, you know, like, what other kinds of jewelry do you own and tell me about your life and that kind of thing. And we got a couple of, like, super big insights. One, we understood the job to be done. Why did they buy our jewelry and wear our jewelry over other jewelry? What specifically was it doing that's different than, you know, anybody else? And we heard that it made them feel special. And special didn't mean necessarily the most. Like, on fashion, whatever. They wanted a comment. So if they wore a necklace, they wanted people to notice and say something about that specific piece. They didn't want to just blend in with the look everyone had. They wanted to be unique. And it was about being noticed and feeling good. So that was the first thing we noticed. And then we noticed that they were not, like, they were also not mainstream people, the passionate collectors. Right. Oh, these are unusual. They're a little bit like a standout, unique character in the best way. And then we started to notice the other brands. Not jewelry, but other things that they carried. Right. And so then we were able to figure out other stores that carried those other brands. And we did a massive, rapid expansion into all those other stores because we reached out to them and said, you know, we know that if you carry these brands, your customer will love this stuff for these reasons and what it is. And bang. That message was, like, right on and so well received. And, like, you know, we doubled the company very quickly with that insight and that execution on it. But it came from them telling us who we were for them. Who we were was different than who we thought we were for them. Right. It was different and distinct. And then a little bit more about their other world, the other brands, the other things that they loved, gave us an easy path to find more of them.

Yeah. And what you're doing is you're becoming that trusted industry advisor, that consultant masquerading as a salesperson. That's really what buyers are telling us today. You know, if you ask a salesperson, why'd you lose an order? Because we also do win loss analysis. Always price. Price is usually on the list, right? Yeah, it's usually three on the list. The number one reason why buyers don't buy is I don't really think the salesperson understood the problem I'm trying to solve. So I really didn't trust their solution.

Wow.

What if we took a little bit of time and trained that salesperson on common traits, common aspirations, common challenges, how to ask questions that confirm and validate those challenges? And that's what we do today. But, no, what you did with that jewelry company is spot on right. When you do it, you'll experience what I call explosive growth.

So your voice of customer process, when you're doing it for others, on behalf of others, talk to us about what that looks like, how long does that take, how many people are involved? Give us a feel for that process.

Yeah, first. And believe it or not, the biggest challenge is actually the accuracy of your data. I can't tell you how many CEOs we speak with and they're like, oh yeah, we have 1800 records, no problem. Mark a statistically valid, you want to interview 400, no problem. But when we start working with their people, their records are terrible. In a digital age, when you should be doing, you know, marketing messaging in the voice of your customers. Anyways, the way it starts is, you know, we convince them that we need to have some customer insights before we write your strategy. We want to talk to people that are current customers and we also want to know customer tiers. We have NDAs with all our clients, so we get their revenue by customer. We usually break it into three tiers. Typically, you know, your top 80% of revenue comes from, or I should say profits come from your 20% of your customers. So we want to know who they are. And when we interview them, then we want to know who your middle market is. And then who are those little straggler accounts that you really don't give a lot of time or credit to, but could be an A account. Right. We want to talk to people who used to buy from you, maybe even in your top 10 that aren't on the top 10 anymore. And more importantly, I want to talk to people you lost. Those are the folks that are brutally honest. They don't have any relationship with you. They never created that bond. So they'll tell me, look, I didn't like the way I was treated. I didn't think the person followed up fast enough. They didn't communicate value. I mean, they just go on and on. I get more insight from people you didn't sell than people you sell. So we create these tiers and then we create questions. We have common questions. We always want to know as far as like customer satisfaction, net promoter score. But typically my accounts want five or six questions that they've always wanted to know that keep them up at night. Like my favorite, right? Working with small family run businesses, our customers do not shop on the Internet.

Yeah, right. People believe that used to be true of some people, but not anymore.

So that's one of the questions. Where do you go when you're Looking for a solution today. Now, if I'm personally doing the interviews, like, if it's one of my scaling up clients and I'm trying to get insights into some of their larger accounts, my favorite question is, if you were the president of this company and wanted to sell you more, what would you do? And the hardest part is shutting up, right? We want to fill that vacuum. Let them talk, let them be uncomfortable in the silence, and you'll be amazed at what they say. One of my scaling up clients, I asked that question of their second largest account. They basically laid out an entire account development plan and even told me people we should be talking to inside their organization. And then he became a champion. He's like, well, if you want to do this, I'll help you. I believe in your product, I believe in your service, I'll help you. Right? So the way the process starts is we write your questions. You approve the questions, you give us the list. We approve the list. We test it in our software. If we're doing, you know, 500 calls, 600 calls, it's going to take us about five weeks. And then we produce an executive brief where we look at all the insights and you basically get free consulting from me. I go over the insights, I'm like, look, there's about five key pillars that we learned when we interviewed your customers, and here's what they are. But, oh, by the way, if you want to look at the data, we also have an Excel spreadsheet of every interview and every question we asked and how they answered it. And that often becomes a business development process. However, we have to teach your salespeople what to do with that data. What we don't want is for your customers to feel this voice of customer exercise with some kind of a sales trick.

Right?

Because they'll never participate again.

So often we train, say, hey, you asked for XYZ here.

Hey, I see you said I didn't call you quick enough or no, don't do that.

Right? Yeah.

So we give salespeople enough direction, but not a lot of insight as far as exact words and things. But, you know, these following customers said they would like to learn more, please call them. And we give them questions that would actually create a conversation around the topic. And then we ask, you know, how would you like us to help you more? It's not unusual to find that what customers value most is never even stated in the customer's value proposition. So we might do a value proposition workshop and help them write a value proposition that resonates with the people we interviewed, there's all kinds of things that can come out of this.

So what's the time frame that this takes place in?

Yeah, usually if it's going to be 200, we did like 1200 interviews. It takes about five weeks. As you can imagine, people are more difficult to get a hold of than ever before. So one of the processes that we implemented is we want your team to not be afraid of the results. So we encourage them. Once we have the list, they send an email to everybody saying, look, we've hired OTB Solutions because we want to improve, we want to give you better service. Please participate. If they call, if they send that email out, we have a very high participation rate. If for whatever reason they don't execute, we might have to call somebody 11 times before we can have an interview.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We often do a fairly abbreviated thing and today I think one of the dangers in giving people the, the actual data, I mean it's their data, they can have it if they want it, but is that they will, they'll gravitate to the things they want to hear and they'll fixate on that. So interpreting your own data rather than having it done for you is a challenge. And one of the ways that we get around that simply is we'll take whatever data we collect in whatever means and we'll throw it into ChatGPT and say summarize this question, what are the five main themes here? Or whatever. And you can get really fast, it's not super accurate, but you can drop in some survey data and ask it to summarize, especially qualitative type questions, right?

Yeah. And again, I've yet to meet one of the customers that didn't want to be served better.

Yeah.

So as long as you ask open ended questions in the spirit of serving them and improving your service with them, they typically contribute. If for whatever reason you have a hostile person, our team is trained on how to handle them. We try to capture as much as we can and then we get them off the phone. But the insights that we get is incredible. Sometimes you'll get use cases that you didn't even know people were doing with your products. It turns into whole new markets.

All right, so if I've got a smaller company, maybe I'm only like a couple dozen people, 100 or less. And I don't have a big budget, I don't have a huge customer list. What, what are, what are the key steps to start to do this on my own?

Okay. First try to figure out what you want to know, what's the purpose? Is the purpose to understand why you win and why you lose. Then your questions are going to be different than if your purpose is, how am I going to scale this business?

Right.

Identify who you're going to call. Try to get two or three people at each company, though, because again, one of, one of the things we work with is buyer Personas, decision maker Personas. And the conversation you're going to have with a quality manager is much different than the conversation you're going to have with a CEO. So we really want you to have different voices at each one of your customers and then develop your list. You can Google voice of customer interview questions. You can go into ChatGPT, it'll write 20 of them for you, 100 of them if you'd like. But it all starts with the worthy intent, though. You have to genuinely care. You don't want to sound like you're in a script. I don't know about you, but if you ever had somebody on a sales call call you with a script, doesn't make me feel very special. It doesn't feel very authentic.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's the problem with a lot of outsourced customer service, telemarketing kinds of things. They just sound like they're reading a script and you're like, I'm dealing with a moron. And they're not morons, they're just operating in a very rigid environment and they.

Don'T know what they don't know. So you've got about five seconds when the other person picks up the phone that agreed to do an interview to convince them that this is an experience that's going to help them. People buy for two reasons, competence and trust. So we teach people how to build trust quickly. But for that small company, maybe it's a startup, maybe they got 12 to 20 people. Number one on the list is do not let your salespeople do this ever.

Yeah, yeah.

The person who should own it is somebody in the executive level, somebody that in an ownership position. If you're a large company, this is where product management and marketing owns this. And they're like, but Mark, you're a sales guy. How could you be so harsh? Well, I can tell you. Bias. Right? We listen to reply. We don't listen to learn. Right. You've taught us to be hunters that we are. If we hear somebody have a complaint, we're going to try to sell through it. We don't listen and write it down. And then also relationship. Yeah, relationship. With me, they're not going to be 100% honest as they will with a stranger.

Yeah, there's not the same room and permission. We're not trained to really speak and listen deeply in that way.

And then I also encourage, after you've done it, send something to everybody that participated, let them know that you were listening and what you plan to do with it. You're not going to be able to do everything but tell them during the interview. You know, we're going to capture some of these insights and if we hear it enough, we're going to make a difference. We're going to change. My client in Kentucky did a fantastic job with this. We helped them right after the pandemic get their revenue back on track. And they actually sent the results with some of my slides, with graphs and everything to all their clients saying, here's what we heard you say, here's what we're going to do. If there's anything else, let me know. And the CEO put his email on it. That's right.

Yeah.

That's real. All right.

Yeah. Yeah. The company is no smoke and mirrors. If you want to find out more About Mark's company, nosmokandmirrorrors.com will throw it up. There it is on the screen. It'll be in the show notes as well, so you can find out more about the work they do. But I think this is like fundamentally, go talk to some customers, learn what they have to say, get a broader perspective, send a few of your execs out, hire somebody else to do it, Start in layers, maybe start simple and then expand it and be open to the inside. I think it's really powerful work. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show with us today and talking with us about your world and your work. It's useful to hear from other coaches, I think super actionable stuff here. Some shout outs to the folks at Storyon who produce our show, find our guests, get things ready, get them produced and distributed out in the world. It's great to have a partner in whatever you do. The folks at podfly who edit our audio and push it out to all the platforms. Thanks to my friend and mentor for many years, Vern Harnish, who created the whole Rockville habits and the scaling up framework that came before it. I want to thank all of you. If you don't already, like, subscribe, download, turn on notifications, get the shows automatically twice a week. Generally we put out shows for you so we've got something and of course all the back catalog, wherever you're getting this now, or at our own website, scalingcoach.com you'll find all that and more. Thanks again for watching, for listening. We'll talk to you again next time.

Keep scaling it.