Customer Mastery Live (replay) - Customer Revenue Thinking - Customer Velocity Playbook

Hey, looks like we're going live. Exciting stuff. A very good welcome to all of my LinkedIn colleagues and friends. Uh, to my YouTube crew and those kind of connecting live right now. Just a few minutes before we start some trading, but wanted to just offer an introduction. A lot of people haven't had the opportunity to connect with me directly, but it's an opportunity for us to get to know each other also. Uh, this is fantastic. So, um, let's think about this in this way. Um, we're going to be thinking about this whole idea of customer velocity, customer velocity being something that is going to fundamentally change the way we think about how we map and grow and accelerate our results with our existing customers. And for us to do that, for us to do that successfully, we're going to need to think about some really important areas, areas that perhaps we may not have been challenged with or thought about in advance. So let's do this and think about this in very practical, really practical terms as well. So let's think about it this way. The first premise we want to get to is the understanding that no growth result happens by mere chance. It's an act of forces working together. And oftentimes, most of what we want from our customers isn't coming from getting more, but better understanding what we have, is getting to grips with much better thinking before applying different kinds of activities and actions. And that's what we're going to think about very practically today in what we're going to do. So I'm going to share some slides with you. We're going to do some really fun training today as we think about some of these different areas, but I promise you it'll be super, super valuable as we go through this together. So get Get your pen and paper ready. I'm going to switch to slides and we'll start thinking about how we can really get to grips with a lot of the things that we've been talking about already. Okay, awesome. So let me do this now. I'm going to jump right into this presentation. So let's think about it this way. Obviously, we're thinking about 5 growth acceleration components, right? The need to eliminate wasted activity, client stagnancy, and see faster, more profitable, and consistent growth with more of our customers. And for us to go do this, we're going to need some different thinking, some different way of perceiving the way in which we show up with and for our customers. So the first premise I want to give you is that I personally believe that good companies and leaders should never struggle to grow their existing accounts, their best customers. I truly, truly believe that. And if you're finding it to be a struggle, then there's perhaps some things that we can learn and you might garner from this specific training, this information I'm about to share. That doesn't mean necessarily that Grow Your Customers won't be challenging at some points, but there should never be a struggle when you know what you're looking for and how that needs to show up inside of your business. So let's explore a couple of things today. So customer growth and revenue generation today tends to look like this. We have time and we have revenue, but there's an art and a science to customer growth for leaders and organizations to really consider, but rarely do both of them well, really do both of them well. And so what we want to think about here are a couple of things that we see show up in very traditional businesses that are experiencing challenging growing their customers, right? They start off with a certain kind of revenue, an expectation that they start with a client, and they start to move along that revenue line as time goes up. But what happens is as time increases, obviously revenue is going up, but then it flatlines, then it goes down, and there seems to be this discontinuity that's there. And the way in which we solve for that today is we think about activity, relationship, partnerships, incentives, events, upsells, cross-sells. We start to put it a lot of different things we believe might provide value for our clients. In a lot of cases, this might work, but overall what we're experiencing is what I call random acts of success. These are specific results that turn up and show up in our business, but we're unable to do repeatedly and predictably in our business. Meaning if we generated $100K today with our clients, we would actually have no idea how to go replicate that again in the exact same way using the exact same process and strategies because we haven't really understood what influences the result. We haven't understood how to plan specifically for revenue generation and partnership with our customers. But instead, what I'd like to do is to perceive a different kind of way to think about our revenue. One where we're actually thinking about that same timeline, but instead of having these huge variances in revenue success, we're going to see different things. We're going to see incremental steps going up and could be more consistent. And this is what we call a customer revenue framework, where we're getting higher value activities. We understand what influences results, and we can accelerate mutual value with more of our customers. And here's where we get not random acts of success, but we get recurring acts of success, ones that we can look at more proactively and say, hey, I know how to do this. I know what influences the result. And we can do this more repeatedly with the companies and more of the companies and clients that we work with. And that's the kind of power that I want to be able to share with you today in terms of customer revenue frameworks and thinking more proactively around how we actually govern and think about customer growth strategy and getting velocity inside our businesses. So session today, I'm gonna cover a couple of things. One, it's gonna be the 3 mistakes that I see a lot of leaders making with their teams in terms of focus and assumption. We're gonna look at those because I think these are really gonna get in the way. There are others, but I wanna talk about 3 most common. Next, I wanna look at the 5 growth revenue thinking areas. The 5 revenue growth thinking areas are gonna be super important for you to consider. And I will look at specifically one area just to go a bit deeper on. Then we're gonna take one specific action that's gonna be helpful for you. And then we'll look at the next step. So what specifically from that action could you apply to ensure that you can begin moving more towards revenue growth thinking and applying a framework to your methodology today. So here are a couple of things I want you to think about. 3 mistakes costing you up to 40% growth with your existing customers today, right? So your teams are using almost every tactic under the sun to get results, and many might be frustrated. But when being asked to produce greater revenue results every year, they might be spending less time and value activity, less time in moving relationships forward. Instead, they're battling to get attention, navigating internal challenges, doubling down on failed expansion strategies and stakeholder initiatives, and it all sucks. So much of what we think works in customer growth is just broken. Now customers have, or they're moving to a new kind of expectation. So the first mistake that we make is actually we believe we just need to add more value. This is what I call one of those true-ish statements. Is it true that providing value is important? Absolutely. Is it true that the key to additional revenue growth with customers is the qualitative value and impact of what we actually demonstrate and what the client acknowledges? Absolutely. In most cases, um, this is going to be true. Where it isn't true is that— is the premise of adding more value. Oftentimes the value we're producing actually isn't right now producing acknowledged and sought-after value that the client would appreciate and ask for again. And therefore, the premise here that revenue generation is going to primarily come from just adding more value does not make sense, where we cannot quantify and properly associate value with places where our clients are going to acknowledge and really seek after that in a way in which they would pay premium for. And so value is not the answer, it is something else. And thinking about just adding more value is not going to get you continuity, repeatability, and predictability, particularly when you don't know what is influencing the result. Mistake number 2: we believe we need better account plans. Now, I did a whole LinkedIn Live on this, but do account plans work the the way they should today? In most cases, they don't. So if you're leading a key account team, an account management team, a customer team, the account plans you create are, they are critical to helping you clarify what's important to work on, right? And maybe a route to drive success with customers. The challenge is it can take you weeks to put one together, 2 months and you stop using it consistently. And it's difficult to use daily to coordinate actions and generate recurring results, particularly when you're trying to build out a revenue Strategy. As a leader, it's your responsibility to ensure that from a departmental point of view and from a team perspective, you have a governing framework to help you understand how to make sense of what you're seeing inside your customer portfolio accounts and how to adjust to those appropriately and proactively. Instead of thinking about account plans, we'd start thinking about account plays or playbooks to help us to make sense of that. So just believe we need better account plans is not going to solve your revenue growth or client growth challenge. Mistake number 3, we believe we have great relationships because a customer stays or buys again. Now, this assumption is the death of most companies and their customers, and they get pretty shocked once the client leaves that they say they have a great relationship. We should never confuse convenience of staying for commitment and loyalty from a client. Never confuse the two. A customer staying is great, A profitable customer, even greater. A loyal customer is invaluable. But all of those carry very specific, different qualitative measures that you can apply to help you understand it. But just having the relationship itself without quantifying the reputation that you have across the business and providing a defense of your services, it doesn't matter. A customer staying or buying again has no bearing on whether or not they're going to buy more from you continually, repeatedly, more profitably later on. That is a different kind of perspective and thinking, and it needs to be designed into a customer revenue growth framework. So what do we actually really need, knowing those 3 different mistakes? What we really need is a shift in perspective before any shift in activity. Every single lead, every year, leaders, teams commit more time, more effort, more resource, more people, to maintain what they have with their customers. True or false? It happens. So just doing more isn't helping. Adding new technology is just a fraction of a solution. Adopting best practice can make you competitive, but only for a short time. And more than a third of the metrics evaluated in the sale or accelerated profits of a business revolves around the customer. So to have a revenue growth framework is essential. It's not something any of you should ignore. It should be one of your number one priorities this year. So how do we define, how do we think about customer revenue growth thinking? Well, let's have a think about customer revenue growth thinking, because when it comes to our existing customers, we know it is critical to ensure we are delivering great work, recognizable value, deepening relationships, brand ties, all those things that are really helpful. When it comes to growth though, we can often think very linear. What we see is working is often not predictable, scalable, or really should be a leading metric for growth. So customer-ready growth thinking is a way to approach all of our customers that allows for greater mutual valuable results to be seen over time consistently. It's a way for us to view and to put together meaningful activity that's going to give us a likelihood, a much stronger likelihood of continual results in partnership with our customers consistently over time. So over the last 5 years serving hundreds of teams, literally hundreds of different growth approaches being seen, they tend to all fall into a range of different areas once you begin to have a look at this. And we're gonna look at 5 areas of revenue growth thinking before diving a little bit deeper in. So the first is— first area is customer growth categories. Customer growth categories, these are the areas that show the emphasis of where customer growth shows up typically with your accounts. So I'm going to go through all 5. We're not going to be able to cover all of this in this particular training, but I just want to cover these particular categories. The category, or this growth area I should say, number 1 is customer growth categories. For revenue growth thinking, customer growth categories, the areas that show the emphasis of where customer growth shows up typically with your accounts. And we're gonna tap on into this later on. The second are customer growth revenue patterns, right? These are the way your customers currently purchase your products and services, the pattern of that revenue, how it comes into the business. So if you ever ask the question, what kind of revenue growth are experiencing? With our customers. This is where revenue growth patterns comes in. You know, I was first asked this question back in 2015 with one of my companies and then with one of my customers. I was surprised to see over the years there was— I saw a number of different revenue growth patterns, 7 more specifically, that we saw identified. And each of these growth patterns, uh, was interesting. It told you a story about the relationship with the customer. It's not good or bad, but simply an observation. But once you understand these revenue growth patterns, it actually gives you much more power to understand how to influence the result. That's revenue growth patterns. The third area of revenue growth thinking is customer velocity. And customer velocity is really, really powerful. Customer velocity is a measure It helps a business to focus on the lead indicators within their business that allows for greater revenue and profitability growth for a customer or customer portfolio. So depending on your business, there'll be areas that need greater distinction and application. But overall customer velocity can be measured in 5 really influential areas: average revenue per customer, lifetime value, customer profitability, the product service mix, product service adoption rate. All of these different areas will accompany a velocity conversation. What I want you to acknowledge here is that this formula can be many internal and external influences. But the point here is revenue growth thinking helps you to figure out, identify where those velocity triggers are, and it's extremely powerful. So it's the areas in your business that when worked on give you a higher likelihood of repeatable growth success with customers, right? Those triggers, those things you can activate and use as lead measures to determine how quickly you can move or how profitably you can move with a customer or a portfolio of customers. The fourth area of revenue growth thinking is customer growth strategy. And these are the developed strategies being executed to grow your existing customers. So once you've understood the categories, the patterns, you understand the What are the triggers? This is where you can be informed with how to put together a growth strategy. So as a leader, you're gonna be thinking about this at a high level. You're gonna be identifying the growth categories, the patterns that you're seeing, the triggers, and informing and supporting your team, better understanding how to put together really robust strategies to drive growth in a more meaningful and consistent way. Then the last of the 5 areas of revenue growth thinking specifically for customers is around adjustments, customer growth adjustments. Customer growth adjustments are this strategically what you believe needs adjusting, elimination, or doubling down on to accelerate growth potential. So once you've begun executing the strategy, what's gonna happen is typically you're gonna need to make some adjustments. Sometimes you have new information that comes in. Sometimes you have new technology that comes in. And that will give you either your information to know, hey, what to adjust, what to eliminate, or what to double down on to accelerate growth potential. So there's going to be constant iteration and consideration on how best to make use and get greater value from the strategies that you're actually executing on and delivering inside the business. So this is what it kind of looks like. So once you have The customer growth categories that feeds in understanding the patterns, it feeds into velocity, that feeds your customer growth strategy. And then you're thinking about the adjustments that you're making as you're executing that strategy. And it simply follows that suit. And we can't cover everything on this, this particular training, but I'm going to share a few thoughts on the first of these areas, which is the importance of acknowledging your customer growth categories, customer growth categories. Now, when it comes to our existing customers, obviously I've mentioned this, we know it's critical to delivering great work and recognizable value. All those things are really important, but we can think very linear. And what we see as working is often not predictable or scalable in any kind of way. And so we want to get much more intelligent much more clear about how to go and do that practically, how to go do it practically inside our businesses. So here's what we want to think about. We want to think about these specific areas. Now let's take this first premise and move from there. The first here is this interpretive growth. Interpretive growth is where we hear from our customers And we ask, we examine, we interpret, and we infer from their needs what the best solution might be for that challenge or business objective. So let me give you an example. So with Interpretive for Growth, you're going to have the opportunity to hear from your customers from varying different vantage points, from different departments, and from varying different marketplace initiatives. And all of that information flowing into your business provides an opportunity from hearing from your customers to examine and understand where you might be able to position a new solution. And oftentimes it's happening, often it's happening daily, weekly, monthly. You're constantly being given information that helps you to interpret solutions that may be beneficial to your customers. The question is, how aware are you of that information? And how equipped are you to actually turn that information into propositional value for your clients? So that's interpretive growth. The second is predictive growth. And we look at the buying frequency, trends, seasons, and triggers for purchase, right? We use this to shape conversation and build forecasts. And this is more prevalent in recurring model businesses here, monthly recurring and your recurring businesses. Predictive growth is all about knowing what the buying frequency is based on preceded agreements and understandings. And that can help you to make sense of where you might see opportunities in the future. Then we have creative growth, things you build out of the collective understanding from the customer. These may be unknown or undiscovered by you or the customer, but it's designed together with very specific strategic intent for long-term mutual business together. And partnership growth is going to be the next piece— use of other companies' services, skills, and resources to bring recognized value to your customers. Now, within all these 4 different growth areas, you're going to see a lot of yourselves in it. In fact, what we find is most companies are using all 4 of these different areas to deliver results inside their business. So what I want to do is offer an opportunity for you to see what it is that you could be doing inside your business. You could be doing inside your business. So let's take this particular approach then, and I'm gonna do a bit of a, a whiteboard with you so we can have a look at this together. All right, so we're gonna have a look at this together. We're gonna think about this whole idea of your interpretive, predictive, creative, and partnership growth. So we've already talked about this, right? The whole idea of velocity or growth. Yeah, so we know, so we know that in order to get velocity and growth, we need a different perspective. We need to think differently about the way in which we're engaging with our clients. And so the big thing here is we want to make sure that we know what is influencing the result. What is influencing the result? Influence is the term here, and we have a process to go and do that. The first, uh, we understood is understanding the revenue growth patterns, patterns that we have, and the categories that exist in it. So we can talk about categories right now. Just like we mentioned. I will give one specific example here with categories that allows us to think differently about what we're doing. And we're going to think about interpretive growth within the growth categories. Interpretive. Okay, so how do we make sense of interpretive growth as it relates to velocity? Well, let's just imagine for a moment that you have a client on this side, and this client is now producing, um, they're sending you emails. So you're getting emails from, from this client. You're getting, you're having phone calls, you're on Zoom. They're making introductions for you. Yeah, introductions. You're getting a lot of information come from your client. Now the challenge is, is oftentimes our response on the other side is quite passive. So what happens is we look at this information and we kind of take it in a very linear way. Yeah, so we look at each one's individual, and what will happen is only if something urgent happens in one of these channels does it become an issue. So maybe we have it here and we go, oh my gosh, something has happened via email, and now I need to go and respond, something needs to happen. Now, interpretive growth can either be proactive or passive. And so, but oftentimes when we're getting information from clients, it's often passive. We're not really thinking about what is it specific here that allows me to interpret a new level of value and opportunity with our customers. And so if we thought about it in a different way, we said, well, actually from our email, phone, Zoom calls, and introductions, where are the common threads that tie back to mutual value and opportunity with our clients, would begin to see what we call interpretive growth, which is not passively looking at this, it's looking at this as a whole. It's saying, what is the story? What is the story? So we're saying here, what What is the story? So as a leader, when you're working with your teams, you asking the question, what is the story? When we're getting information coming from the client, we're not asking what's doing, what's happening, what's necessarily happening within the client. That's easy, that's easy to have. You can go look at the CRM to find that out. You can have those in coaching conversations. But if we're looking at specific strategy and looking at how we can grow revenue across our entire portfolio, or thinking about a particular key account, we want to ask ourselves, what is the story being told today? What's the story between us and the client? What is their story? And that informs us, helping us to understand interpretive growth. Once you've understood interpretive growth, then we need to understand what patterns we're seeing, which is what that second area is. What patterns are we seeing? How are they actually buying from us today in response to the story story that we're seeing. And once we understand the patterns, then we can move to understand what are the triggers for that specific pattern? What's inferring? What's it enforcing? What's influencing those specific results? And are those results that we actually want? So we can begin to look really, really carefully once we understand the category. If our category tends to be interpretive growth, where we get— where we get information and then we're rushing around to figure out exactly how to respond. That is a really poor way to run your department. What you want to do is to think about the story. What is the story being told in this specific account? Then we understand from there what are the particular patterns that we're seeing in buying behavior. The second— that was the second piece. The third piece is What are the triggers? What are the velocity triggers? What are things that are influencing those results? And then we formulate a strategy to make sense and to make that more meaningful as a process for our teams. If we can do that, we can have a really, really powerful opportunity to transform everything that we do with our clients. Okay, so that's on that part directly. So let's have a think about this. We're going back here to focusing on our growth categories. So we just looked at interpretive growth a little more closely. And knowing— going through that particular process of saying, once we know the category, we're asking ourselves, what is the story? What is the story that we're seeing? And that story helps us to infer what happens next, or the plan of action. If we're not asking ourselves, what is the story? And thinking about the data that we're seeing and what's being reviewed, we are going to find ourselves in random acts of success. And we're going to do this for each of these 4 growth categories, whether it's interpretive or predictive or creative growth or partnership growth, which is the use of other companies' services and skills and resources to bring recognized value to your customers. Once we have that in play, we always want to ask ourselves, as information comes in from our clients, what is the story? Then move into what patterns are we seeing buying behavior? And then move from there into asking the question, what is it— is going to be the appropriate strategy? What's influencing— based on what's influencing the result, what is the appropriate strategy? And if you can apply that level of thinking, you'll find yourself in a much more powerful position to make change happen. To make change happen in a very real way. So going back again to this, customer growth categories, the patterns, then the velocity, then customer growth strategy comes out of those places. Good stuff. So let's go to this part here and have a think about an action that we can take. Or even before the action, let's think about, um, some thoughts to consider. So number one, you need a revenue growth framework. You 100% need one. You need to avoid the three costly mistakes that many leaders make. We need to identify your growth patterns, super important as that first thing. And your assumptions are unchecked, they're going to kill your velocity. So we need to ensure that we're really holding in mind that if we're seeing growth in our customers, are we seeing that as something we can repeat and predict? Is this random act of success that we can repeat and do again, or is this recurring acts of success? Are we seeing this continually and consistently? If that isn't the case, we need to make a change immediately. Immediately. So what's the one action I want you to have a think about? Where's the action? If you, if you want to know how to learn this, if you want to know how to create your own Vlocity framework in your business, how to apply customer revenue growth thinking to your business, I want you to do this one thing: leave a comment saying Vlocity training inside the chat. Whether on YouTube or whether on LinkedIn, leave a comment saying Vlocity training in the chat, and one of my team members we'll get in contact with you directly to send you a link to when this training goes live, a free training on building your velocity framework along with a worksheet to go with that. Or if not, you go straight to jermaineedwards.com. You can get access to our mailing list and you'll begin to get access, and you can see all the different opportunities for you to learn, grow, and scale your customer impact in your business. So let's just go back together here just before we go back. So thanks again for, for watching, really appreciate you. Again, understand your categories, and I promise you, promise you, once you begin to apply revenue growth thinking, it will transform the way you do everything with your customers. And I'll see you soon.