Podcast Episode #13: RAS Moments

Hi and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. My name is Jermaine Edwards and I have become obsessed with customer behavior and how people and organizations win with their best customers long term. After starting, failing, and growing my own companies, 30 customer growth projects, hundreds of strategies, and the study of 50 years of customer service research, I've seen firsthand how and why organizations win, lose, and win again with their most important customers. This podcast is my way of sharing those insights, failures, principles, and strategies so you can become what I call an irreplaceable advisor, someone so valuable your customers never want to leave. In an increasingly competitive world, how do you continue to deliver unrivaled value and deepen those most important customer relationships? Join me as your customer growth guide. Your journey starts here.

Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide, and welcome to episode 14 of the Key Customer Growth podcast. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about something that I came across years ago, but it's gradually had greater impact year on year on my life as I think about those specific activities that are giving the highest highest yielding result in my business, in working with customers, and in thinking about life in general. We're going to talk about what we call RAS moments. So let's get started. So here's what it goes— here's how it goes, I should say. Now, have you ever suffered from having a RAS moment? These are moments of random, unrecognized, non-specific success that come with a little bit of luck and are almost impossible to repeat. You know what I mean? That specific deal that you pulled off that you, by right, put in a lot of effort, a lot of energy, a lot of great thought and consideration, but yet you can't actually repeat the same kinds of results year on year. Well, why is that? Well, it's because we haven't quite learned that when we approach these specific kinds of tasks, if we're not documenting and really thinking about the systems of approaches that we're using, we're likely to come out with random acts of success, success that we cannot repeat or replicate or look at predictably to produce year on year. And that's a problem. If we get these specific kinds of results and we can't get them year on year, it means we haven't fully understood exactly what it is that's contributing to our success with our most important customers. And this was something I was told many, many years ago. I didn't quite get it until having my own businesses and thinking about the teams that I support and people that I've now had the opportunity to train and teams that I've personally managed over the years, that if you cannot repeat the same results you had last week, last month with the same actions, effort, and resource, then it's likely you have a, a RAS moment, a Random Act of Success. And that's a problem when it comes to thinking about how you forecast, how you understand what it is that you're seeing in front of you, the behaviors of customers, acknowledging those things, understanding the resources that have been attributed to the things that have made you successful. We can often really miss those very important elements. And so here are the reasons why this becomes so prevalent for organizations, for teams around the world that I've met, and just people who anecdotally would look at their own life and think, yeah, actually, I've had a lot of random acts of success that have been, you know, great moments, but yeah, I haven't really been able to achieve the repeatability of those results year on year. And it's really due to 4 things. We overweight our own actions. That doesn't mean our actions aren't important. And helpful and useful, but we sometimes overweight them without truly evaluating its impact. We undervalue the unseen conditions. Sometimes the conditions in which we do and operate make a difference to gaining the success we want. We also create an informed view of the contributions of others, an uninformed view of the contributions of others, I should say. And we often misinterpret the real influencing triggers and decisions that move a customer to buy, or that moved the specific customer to buy. And so if we look at these 4 different elements: outwitting our own actions, undervaluing the unseen conditions, creating a really uninformed view of the contributions of others, and misinterpreting the influencing triggers or decisions that move a customer to buy, it's very likely, although you may be experiencing some success right now, that you're simply underperforming to your potential. The potential opportunity for you to get into a place where you can repeat your biggest results at will because you understand what has contributed to those elements. So we want to move from a RAS moment that is random to a RAS moment that is recurring, recurring acts of success. So I really like this particular psychologist named Gary Klein, and he said this particular quote. He said, one of the greatest barriers to insight is It's 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. So, because of this, we hold on to these flawed assumptions. They can be unconscious, and we sometimes don't know we're making them, and they're often difficult to spot and correct. So, what do we do when we see things like this, when we notice that we're actually having random acts of success? Well, it's important first of all just to weigh why this is important. So it's easy to make claims and statements, you know, particularly ones I'm making right now. So take a moment and just see if you recognize any of these following scenarios, right? So you achieved an amazing result with the customer but have not been able to achieve it. We've talked about that. You've had your customer rave about something specific you did, but you've never had another customer rave in the same way again. Maybe you've had awesome customer growth one year but then struggled to get the same growth with your existing customers the following year. All of these experiences are what we deem as random acts of success. We don't want any of these things in our business to the degree in which it's possible, and it is possible. We want to get to a place where we are getting recurring acts of success, and it's now been documented in varying different places, and sometimes you have to look a bit closely, a little more deeply to see what's happening, but if we look at some of the research right across institutions, reputable institutions like Gartner, HBR, Private Business Review, Nielsen, just to name a few, they were finding that the percentage generally of leaders that see results from their customer plans year on year, about 47%, still pretty high but actually less than 50%. And we have close to 76% of organizations surveyed by RAIN Group believe that they should be getting 25% more from their existing customers. Now I'm always just like you, skeptical when I see specific stats, so I always like to look at a broad set of stats and then come to a conclusion. The overall conclusion that we can find looking across the board is that fewer people are experiencing recurring results, recurring acts of success than those who aren't. And so, who are. And so, we need to think about how do we get ourselves into the position of the 47% that say they're getting recurring acts of success with the effort and energy and resource they put in versus those that aren't. So, here's where we need to think about this. So what does this all mean? Well, it means that for us to really move into a better place, we need to start asking ourselves very different questions. We need to start thinking about how we more thoughtfully review what's taken place, not these postmortems, you know, after something goes wrong. What we want is really a success review. Why did this go well? How did this happen? What have we learned from this specific engagement, this interaction? How does this impact the way we serve our customers? Where else is this applicable? These are all questions that we should be thinking about and evaluating if we truly want to get better and get a move from just incremental results to really exponential results, results that are uncanny and unrivaled in your industry. So let's just talk about something here, which essentially are 4 powerful approaches to breaking random and moving to recurring success. So the first is a pre-evaluation. So stop making assumptions and carefully note the specific resources, people, strategies, tactics, and conditions of your customer engagements. What is actually happening before you get started. Just make a really short note: who is being used, what resources are you using, what are the strategies you're actually applying, what are the tactics, and what are the conditions. If you can get those things even at a base level to get started, it will put you in such a strong position in considering the work that you're doing and even feeding back to your executives, top executives, as a means of giving greater insight into what could be fed into other parts of the business or globally. Globally, if you work for a much larger business, you also want a post-evaluation. So, ask powerful review questions of the learnings from the project. Who influenced it? What specific conditions were involved? Did they change? What are we learning? Just like I mentioned before. The number 3, we want to ask our customers to find out exactly what influenced your customer to commit to buying from you. Even if they've been with you for 25 years, start to ask the question, hey, what was the What was the difference here for this specific engagement, for this specific project? What convinced you? What are the things that really moved you towards a yes? Get those answers, document those things. We really want to know and see where the patterns are. Number 4, we want to use growth drivers. So make sure your team knows and understands, and they have a practiced and proven consistent plan or playbook for growth and relationship success. And I've talked a lot about the use of growth drivers, relational influence, value advantage, intimate loyalty, utilizing some of these drivers and being aware of those things helps you to contextualize the things that you're using, helps you to identify the specific kinds of drivers that have enabled you to do greater and more successful work. You can use that as a filter to support your engagement. And I'll speak more about this in future podcasts as well. But if you haven't understood things about the growth drivers, you want to jump on my mailing list, or at least jump to the blog so you can figure out some of those areas. And I'll have that linked in the show notes as well. So if we have these 4 specific areas of a pre-evaluation, number 1, a post-evaluation, number 2, asking our customer, number 3, for the use of growth drivers and using that as a filter to understand what it is we're using more frequently, we'll put ourselves in a position where we are more likely to see how recurring success can really be harnessed, can be leveraged in our business, and we move away from random into much more recurring acts of success. So these are really important to consider. So as you look at your own work and conversations, communication with your customer, simply ask, hey, are we really understanding the process to how we're engaging with this customer and gaining success? Are the engagements we are having right now random? Are they recurring? What, to what extent are we confident that we could produce the same kinds of results year on year? If you don't have an answer for that, then it's likely you probably need a change, change in thought and procedure, in thinking about how you really look at your customer engagements. So I'd encourage you, in fact challenge you, to start to think about the actions that you have and the results that you've seen and ask yourself, is this really recurring or is this random? And if the answer is random, Look at the blog that's linked there so you can find out a little more details on these 4 areas. Get into my mailing list. Give me a call if needed. But most importantly, ask yourself better questions. Go through these 4 steps and you'll put yourself in a much stronger position to getting recurring acts of success. That's episode 14. Hope that's been helpful to you. And remember, I don't want you to be random. I want you to move into recurring so you can become the advisor your customer never wants to leave. I'll see you in the next episode.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. Hope you enjoyed the episode and got some great value. If that has been your story today, please share, comment, and subscribe so we can reach more people with the message and impact them also. Most importantly, I want to hear your feedback on what you liked or what you would like to hear and see in the future. Look forward to hearing from you, and you can find all the show notes below. Wishing you success in becoming an irreplaceable advisor.