Customer Mastery Live (replay) - Customer Growth Playbooks

live stream. Welcome to this first live stream, LinkedIn and YouTube. Those who are following me there, welcome. I'm Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide and the founder of the Irreplaceable Advisory Group and Customer Transformation Thinking. Today we're going to be thinking about playbooks today. So if you're a customer leader, part of a team, this is going to be for you. This is going to be significant for you as you think about how you make meaningful influence inside your client accounts. We're going to think about not activity per se, but what influences the result, what influences the likelihood of success happening. This is what playbooks are all around. So we got a short time together, so I'm going to jump right into the content and share my slides so we can get started. All right, well, let's have a think about this right now around playbooks and the meaningfulness of that for us today. So around the world, there's a recognized, but it's kind of an unchallenged reality that holds organizations back from achieving more of their best customers. And that's account plans suck. And they suck to do, they suck to think about because often They're done in the context of an arbitrary stick over the head of a team member to get something done, to take something from a CRM and place it into a document as a measure of activity. It's not done purposefully in a way that helps us to understand how we influence the results specifically with a client for long-term, repeatable, sustainable success. It doesn't mean account plans are completely useless. No, they, they have a lot of value, but the challenge is it can take weeks to put one together, months for some. And if you do want every single account, you need a different way to think about it. And even the one-page account plans fail to do the things that I'm about to share with you. But let's have a look at some of the stats. We know that today 84% of account plans are not achieved every single year. This is Elsevier Research. There are other experiential things I know that you've had that you can speak to directly. But even so, today we find 76% of sales leaders believe they should be getting up to 25% more from their existing customers. I wonder from you, what does 25% more from your existing customers look like? What would revenue look like? What would profitability look like if that were the case, if you could access that 25% And this is why we're going to look at why most account plans fail. The first is clarity, lack of intention, no really clear articulated purpose of the account plan. And yes, I recognize there's going to be some skepticism here. Of course there's a purpose to an account plan, but being able to really clearly articulate the goals, tracked measures with an account, I get that. But listen, that goes into your CRM. And if your CRM doesn't have it, then hey, we need to have another conversation. But that's a part of the account plan problem, is that it's a secondary CRM that's being asked for to be completed by account rep, and that shouldn't be the case. The second is commodity, lack of distinction, unable to tailor to specific customers who are uniquely different to each other. The other is complexity. Lack of coordination, so it can be overly complex and huge amount of time and energy wasted. And then context— this is perhaps the most important one— the lack of relevancy, not given the right contextual ability to be able to do more meaningful and specific strategic work with the client in the moment, in the reality of the relationship right now. So what's the solution? What solution I'm proposing here are playbooks. They're vital for any organization, for every business, even professional sports teams where the analogy comes from. They help individuals and organizations and teams to better plan, to better pivot, to prioritize and strategize things to build and deliver specific results and outcomes. And I'll prove it to you. So let's ask me, ask you this question. What happens versus plans versus plays? Now, question, what does a coach of a professional sports team do if his team's game plan stops working against another team? Well, you know what? The coach runs a different play. That's what happens. Well, another question. What do most key account customer teams or customer serving teams, revenue teams do when a plan with a customer they wrote down stops working? Well, two things. One, they try harder or they simply respond or react with a range of different activities that may or may not work. And a lot of the time aren't necessarily really thought through well. So an account plan fails when it doesn't hold into account the changing nature of your business, the customer's business and market. And this is where those failures come in. So what is a playbook? A playbook— and this is why it's so important here as a tool, as a resource for you— is a playbook is an intentionally designed set of responses to known or anticipated scenarios that give you the greatest likelihood of success with a client. Really important distinction. Intentional, designed, anticipated scenarios that give you the greatest likelihood of success. Here's what we found in one case study working with Dell Technologies, a specific team that we work with. We found that over a million dollars difference for teams who are using playbooks to otherwise. Now, those who are using account plans, Equally, you need to have some plans in place for getting success, but we found it was a significant difference between those who were and those who weren't. So account planners today, they record information, but they rarely transform thinking, support success behaviors, or improve actions. So you need to have a different approach as a leader, as a team member, to think about those client accounts. So this is where Customer Growth Playbooks comes in. Let me introduce you to the 6 most important plays you're ever going to want to know. And here they are. Number 1, One is the assumptions play. This is really about kind of gathering insights and making sure we're challenging the perceptions that we have with clients on a day-to-day basis. The influence of the journey play, which is how we think about the current or contextual input of what we do with a particular account. And then we have an opportunity play, thinking about the different ways in which we create propositions and when we protect the investments that we put in our clients. Then we have 4, we have effective goals. Now this seems arbitrary, but it's super important. Knowing how to adjust for, pivot for goals can be and will be for you important along your client journey. Strategy, understand the strategic play. How do we actually form and formulate those things effectively? And finally, building client super teams, the team's play. How do we ensure that we can collaborate work with, connect with all people well for the benefit of our client and for us and our business. Let's look at two, because we can't go through six in, I think, today, but we definitely go through two of those six to introduce you to exactly what this could look like for you. Let's start with the assumptions plate. And there was a guy named Gary Klein, um, really popular research psychologist, wrote a fantastic book speaking to the areas of assumptions and insights around that. And one of— he said that one of the greatest barriers to insight is holding on to a flawed assumption. But these assumptions are usually unconscious and we don't even know we're making them, so they're difficult to spot and to correct. And he's absolutely right. So a question here, or a statement of understanding, is this: to know what to change to gain greater results with your customers, you must understand what change is needed. You can't possibly change something if you don't know what change is needed. So how do we think about that in this particular play? We have to understand two distinctions, three fundamental truths that happen. Now, within plans that we create, we have the customer in the middle, which is essential. And in the white area, we have all the things that we know about the client inside our plans, right? All the things that we know, we put that together. And we hope from that, that we'll infer some actions that will come from it. Usually those actions are something that happens at the beginning of a relationship, and we try to review it over time, but typically, you know, they don't really get looked at very often because we're responding so much in the moment. However, with PLAYS, we're asking 3 fundamental truths with our client. What do we know about our clients that significantly impact the way in which we work with them successfully? What don't we know? And what do we need to know? Same. So within the play, you're asking those 3 fundamental truths, and it helps you then to think about the questions you would ask within the context of a plan so you can have more meaningful and connected conversations with your client. That is the power of Assumptions Play, of being able to challenge what you believe you know, what you don't know, what you need to know that would support both you and the client in being wildly successful. That's just one example of using assumptions inside a playbook scenario of asking the 3 truths within your account. Let's talk about mapping though. Obviously that growth piece, which I talked about at the beginning, and growth mapping is that process of discovering, right? What's possible. But it's also about something else that I'll talk about that I think is perhaps undervalued and not thought about enough. So growth mapping really is dependent on your ability to determine the next natural and compelling step for your customer, one that's known, understood, appreciated, and sought after by them. If you can determine that, you'll have much more success, much more, much stronger, consistent success with those clients. So how do we think about this? We're going to think about it in 3 specific areas. We have red space mapping, Whitespace mapping, blue space mapping, and all that leads to growth. Red space mapping is all about those things that prevent you from deepening trust. It's all about risk, delivering for your client, thinking about how you gain influence, what removes influence from your client and your relationship. Whitespace thinking is common terminology across the board. We know that about current opportunities, upsells, cross-sells, and so forth. We have blue space opportunity, unknown to you, unknown to your client, and it could be something significant. Maybe it's a strategic partnership between you and your client, but you haven't quite identified it as a way in which you can do that to help you, uh, understand how to grow significantly. So those are the three growth mapping areas. We're going to talk about the red space, which is risk, the red area. So we're going to talk about it in terms of 5 different categories, but one focus. Now, if you ever study risk, it's phenomenal. It's really interesting. I know it sounds really boring, but actually when you get into it, there's some really helpful things to consider. So we have 5 areas: market, financial, strategic, operational, and we have relational. We're going to focus on relational for a moment because the one that we perhaps see and experience the most because we're in conversation with people, stakeholders, and otherwise. So it's going to be important that we have an awareness of this. So number 1, there are 4 things that show up, particularly when we're offering propositions to a client that we need to address. And the first is the question, what's in it for me? This is about the personal gain or loss to that person. We can't identify if this is a risk, are we articulating this well within the account? We're likely to lose our way or lose our ability to influence well with that specific person or group of individuals. The second is, What will people say or think about this? Perceptual risk is, it's actually a real thing. If you think about the way in which people buy today, particularly in the B2B studies, the groups or cohorts of people, that understanding is going to be fundamental. Number 3, risk of future results. So will I regret this later? Am I going to think about this and actually think about this from a place of, hey, buyer's remorse? We want to remove that as far as we possibly can. And the last piece here is what would this actually take? Understanding the risk of present person cost? What do we actually need that person to do? And what really is the cost to them in, in participating with this proposition? We can understand and we can mitigate the risks around that through these 4 lenses. Relationally, we're going to elevate our ability to move deals forward at a velocity that is much quicker than you're experiencing right now. That is the pace, that is the, the power of just looking at one place in the growth mapping area of Red Space Thinking. Just imagine being able to do this, walking into a meeting knowing, hey, I'm going to address these 3, 4 things for this group of individuals, and I've prepared for this in order to win the day. That is the power of having playbook thinking inside your account plan or inside your view of thinking about how you engage a client on a week-to-week, day-to-day, month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter basis. Let's recap a little bit. So the first thing here is, is this: playbooks aren't nice to have, they are a must. Account plans fail because they fall to the 4 Cs that we mentioned, and they fail because of those things. We need to seek to coach to influence and insight, not activity. We need to think about what influences the result. This is where things like assumptions and these risk plays come in into play. Assumptions unchecked, it will kill velocity if you aren't being aware of what we know, what we don't know, what we need to know. The other part is growth mapping is more than just opportunity finding, right? We just talked about risk and the relational risk aspect and how that could be extremely powerful to integrate into a customer conversation or preparation for a customer conversation. So start using playbook principles today. And guess what? If you actually applied all of these 6, we've designed it so you can actually have it all on one page. I just want you to imagine for a moment just being able to look at every single play that you have on one page and be able to respond, adapt, and execute on that on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, knowing with greater clarity and confidence you're moving with a higher likelihood of success to achieve the goals that you want with your client. And we definitely want that for you. I want that for you. You want it for yourself. So action steps then. So I want to be able to give you this specific book. I know there's a cost to this, but I want to be able to give this to you. And there's a bit of a waiting list on it. But if you go to jermaineedwards.com/customer-playbook, you'll be able to get access to this directly. And for you, your team, if you're coaching your team or for a team member, this is going to be for you still. We definitely want leaders to pick this up as a way to coach your teams, a way to support your teams. But if you're a team member who's super ambitious and you want to get stuck in, this is going to be something that you can use practically and immediately also with inside your organization. It's going to be super powerful for you to do that. So we're back again. I really want you to win in this. Playbooks are essential. I want you to win with every single account that you have. So make that choice today, and I'll see you in the next Customer Mastery Live.