Salesforce's Tiffani Bova on the 5 Keys to Driving Faster Growth

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In order of priority, how would you rank these three stakeholders: customers, shareholders, and employees? The order you choose could be the difference between a good company and a great one. Welcome back to Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. I'm business coach Steve Sandusky, and my guest today is Tiffany Bova. Tiffany is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce, and the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices That Will Make or Break Your Business. She's also the host of a popular podcast called What's Next. In today's show, we discuss how to connect employee experience to customer experience and how doing that well will lead to dramatically faster growth. With that, let's get started with Tiffany Tiffany, you are the global growth evangelist at Salesforce. So what is that? And how does one become one?

So I gotta tell you, I've now been here almost 7 years. And if I do a podcast or I'm on stage, like the one question I get is my title and sort of what do I do? So I guess that's mission accomplished because I chose the title. It was a way for me to sort of focus on the fact that I talk about growth to not kind of have my rank, if you will, in my title that leads people to believe I have people, I'm a people manager or a people leader. I'm an individual contributor. Nobody reports to me. I'm not on the sales side of the house, actually. Prior to joining Salesforce, I was a research fellow at Gartner. And so Salesforce asked me to come over and kind of continue doing what I was doing in my previous life and do it for us. And so I get to travel around the world and meet with customers and clients and speak at events and do advisory boards and roundtables and have really these incredible conversations with such amazing customers, as well as non-customers, I should say, because, you know, obviously, there's lots of change happening in the world at the moment.

There certainly is. So you spent some time at Gartner. A previous episode that we recently released was with Brian Kropp, who is with Gartner. We talked about HR, so a great episode there, and some great folks at Gartner, including yourself, an alumni there. Now, let's talk about Salesforce for a second here. I heard you say on another podcast that you don't think Salesforce sells technology. Now, I think there's a meta idea in there to some extent. So I'd love for you to explain that a little bit further. What do you mean by that? And how can that apply to how other people think about what their company actually does?

So the end of that comment is, 'cause, you know, obviously, huge surprise, Salesforce sells technology. But the end of that is I don't believe Salesforce sells technology. I believe we sell change. And change is super hard. And so technology is only as good as the people and processes that you surround the technology with. Yes, automation will do things sort of without human touch, but automation has to be designed by humans. So you have bias in that, you know, you have blind spots, you have the status quo-ism where I'm just going to take this software and I'm gonna replicate what I'm doing in my existing software and do it with this new software. And then I go, wow, I'm not getting really good results, right? And so I truly believe that we sell change. Now, to the backside of that question, which also kind of lends itself to my answer, is I try to look at everything with a jobs-to-be-done lens. And if you're listening and you don't know what that is, don't feel badly. Like, you know, I say this a lot on stage and it is a concept around Do people buy a quarter-inch drill or do they buy a quarter-inch hole? I would argue, you know, that's sort of the statement that was kind of the beginning of jobs to be done. Theodore Levitt sort of made that statement. Clayton Christensen made it famous in Innovator's Dilemma. It's a great book to read, you know, on how to deal with disruption. But everything is based on this job to be done, meaning the job remains constant over time. It's the solution that changes. So if you think about financial services or banking, there was bartering thousands of years ago. So there was transactions. It just was with sticks and chickens and cows and goats and something that they saw of value to get something else. Fast forward thousands of years, and now it's Bitcoin or it's Venmo, whatever it might be from a digital currency and digital transaction standpoint. But the job to be done was I want something, you have it, I'm going to give you some monetary value for it and get it back. So the job to be done has remained constant. The solution or the technology is what has changed. And I would argue that people don't also buy quarter-inch holes in the wall. You don't sort of put one in the wall and look at it and go, oh my God, isn't that a beautiful hole in the wall? No, you want to hang a shelf or build a desk. So I don't think he took it far enough, but I understand the point. And so you have to ask yourself, what is it that I'm truly selling? What is the job to be done? Is it retirement? That's the job, you know. Is it my client wants a new home, so they want to, you know, move to another city, a state, place in the world? Now you have to back into that and say, what are all the little things along the way that gets to that job to be done, and how those solutions have changed over time? And then the question becomes, are you keeping up with those solution shifts, or are you holding on to the way the solutions used to be done. So that may seem like a very confusing answer to a very quick question, but if you can really ground yourself for a moment and understand what is the job to be done that you are selling, that you are trying to solve, it will change the way you market, position, have conversations. Now you're not talking about the drill bit, you're not even talking about the drill, you're talking about how beautiful that shelf will you know, present your family photo. That's the job to be done.

Yeah, and I like how you frame this with the job to be done, but then you also tie it into oftentimes the job to be done requires change. And a lot of us don't like change. And a lot of folks listening to this are using Salesforce's CRM system, and they're using other systems as well. And oftentimes it's difficult to get them to adopt the system. What have you found? I know we could have a whole nother episode on this, so we don't need to go too deep of a dive here, but what have you found maybe at a high level in terms of that change process to get people to adopt the new technology as a way to get the job done?

I look at it two sides of the same coin. One is input, one is output. It's sort of my fast answer to this question, because as you mentioned, we could talk about this for a very long time. But if you're talking specifically about Sales Cloud, there's a lot of input, right? A human has to input. I talked to this client, here's their information. I sent this out, I did this, they asked for that. It catches the, you know, it's a lot of human data input. And a lot of the feedback I hear of why sales reps, let's say, are not logging in is because it's viewed as this input mechanism, right? It is a way for managers from a productivity standpoint to see what are you doing, what's in the pipeline, what's in the forecast, It's all very internally focused. Output is a very different conversation. It is what can the system give to the quote-unquote seller in anticipation for what they should be doing. So input is call these 100 people and then mark down what you did. Output would be call these 10 people who are more likely to do something with you, and here are the 3 or 4 things you should do because they look like other customers who did the same thing. And when we did this, we sent them this email, or we made this phone call, or we made this offer, we got this result. And so the more we can make the system output value to the user all up with technology, period, if you can output value, then they're more likely to say, okay, I understand. Because once again, their job to be done was closing business. Like, they're trying to retire quota. And so if you make it too much effort, to get that job to be done, the solution doesn't matter. They'll go back to the rudimentary, I'll just call, leave it on a Post-it note, call it a day, right? So bottom line for me is there has to be value for the user.

Okay. Now I do want to touch a little bit here on your book, Growth IQ, that I think came out in about 2019 or so. And I think that'll be a good lead into the main topic here today, which is about the employee experience, how that relates to the customer experience and how that drives growth. So a couple areas with the book Growth IQ. First of all, I want you to just tell me briefly what the book is about. And then second, there's two particular parts of that book that I want you to touch on as well. So just briefly, what is the book about?

So it's 10 Paths to Growth. I went back in time, you know, across my advising of a decade, as well as a practitioner in sales, marketing, and customer service leader. I ran startups and divisions of Fortune 500 companies. And so I just sort of went back into my bag of tricks and said, of all the advising and all the things I've done, what's worked and what's not worked. And I modernized many growth strategies that have been around for some of them 100 years. And that landed me on these 10 Paths to Growth. And so that's really what the book is about. But more than anything, the kind of one thing about growth is it's never one thing. So it's the combination of paths that makes it really unique. And then the order or the sequence in which you do those strategies for growth that have the greatest impact on your likelihood for success.

Okay, now that book came out prior to the pandemic. We are in the pandemic. Hopefully we're coming out of it. What, if anything, has changed in growth marketing as a result of the pandemic? Are there some of those 10 aspects that you would say, hey, I would overemphasize these areas now because of the pandemic, or these 2 over here are maybe less important because of the pandemic, or has nothing changed when it comes to growth marketing?

So I would say this, I wrote the book so it would be timeless regardless of sort of what situation we were in. There's 30 stories that basically tell my story of the book. And they were points in time stories, meaning that point in time for that particular company will never change. Right? So like when Starbucks did something, they did it. It's not ever going to change. It wasn't like a, oh, here's the whole story of Starbucks. And then you're like, oh, so much has changed, right? In that period of time, it wasn't going to change. So it's timeless in that way. I might update the stories, but the framework for sure. When the pandemic first hit, one of the growth paths is customer base penetration, really paying attention to your existing customer base. That was always very important to me, but when the pandemic hit, it really bubbled to the top, right? Because all of a sudden everyone was like, what are we going to do? We have to make sure our customers are taken care of. But at the same time, we have to make sure we're bringing revenue in the door. So optimizing the way in which you sell those two, and then customer experience, really those three customer base penetration, optimized sales, and customer experience will remain the constant always. And so I think focusing there is really important. The one caveat I'll put to that is, as we saw in the last recession, and I'm not saying we're going into one, I'm just saying, making a comment during the last recession, those brands that doubled down on customer experience initiatives and optimizing the way they sell and really investing in modernizing their environment came out in a much better position. And that's hard when people are really tightening their belts, right? When they're like, uh-oh, things are getting tough. I don't wanna spend money, especially if you're very small, small entrepreneur, small company, that balance between don't spend too much and put yourself in trouble, but spend enough so when you come out the other side of it, you're in a much better position.

So one of the 10 that you didn't just mention here is unconventional strategies and to disrupt current thinking. Tell me about that. Did you see some good examples of unconventional strategies as a result of the pandemic?

Yeah, you know, it was interesting because I had 9 paths to growth and my agent, my publisher, and my publicist, they're like, you need 10. Okay, let me go find the 10th, right? And I was trying to find the next quote unquote freemium model. Which if you remember when software as a service first came out, it was like, try this for 90 days, no obligation. If you like it, fantastic, then we'll start charging you. If you don't like it, no harm, no foul. And you could say we get other, Spotify, you get things for free now, you just, it has advertising. And the whole goal is to get you in the door and then quote unquote upsell you to a paying license. So I was trying to think to myself, What is the next freemium model? It was right as I was joining Salesforce, and I realized the power of the culture here. And our co-CEO, Marc Benioff, and co-founder, he says, you know, business is the greatest platform for change and sort of purpose over profit. So that unconventional strategy is squarely focused on doing well by doing good. So really saying, how do we give back to communities? How do we invest in our people? How do we do things around social issues and DE&I? And how are we just better stewards the stakeholders that we serve as employees, or our offices are in their communities, or our children go to their schools. How can we be better? And just to kind of frame that up, Salesforce powers, I think, it's 16,000 or 17,000 not-for-profits around the world for free. We've donated 7 million hours of volunteer time as a company with our employees. We're trying to plant a trillion trees. We're net zero. We're doing a lot of those things. And so that unconventional strategy was really kind of that TOMS model, right? Buy a shoe, they donate a shoe. Warby, buy a pair of glasses, they donate a pair of glasses. So really trying to think, how can we do well and also do good? So I think through the pandemic, we saw a lot of people, I'm going to take my manufacturing that used to make phone cases and I'm going to make PPE equipment, or I used to make vacuum cleaners and I'm going to make ventilators, or I'm going to— you saw people really rally together in trying to solve these big problems. That the supply chain made very difficult unless everyone sort of tried to figure out how to do it. And we really saw it, which is another path in the book, coopetition. We really saw competitive companies, especially in the drug space and pharmaceutical space, come together to try to solve this as quickly as it did. If it had gone through the normal cycle, right, it would've been years, as everyone has said. You know, it's a 5 to 7 year turnaround. And you get everyone together rallied on a single goal, it's amazing what we all can do.

Now, the first of the 10 that you listed in your book is customer experience. Tell me a little bit about that. And then now that we're here several years after having written the book, is there something that you wish you would have put more emphasis on with the benefit of hindsight?

Yes. So let me answer your first question. I put customer experience first because the whole theory in doing that was your customer should be your true north, right? It should be the reason that you add new products and services, or making sure your customers are happy. Because obviously, you know, you don't pay payroll, your customers pay payroll. You are just the facilitator between the customer's money and giving it to your employees. And so, you know, how do you make sure that those customers are happy? And from an experience standpoint, customers will remember the experience they have much longer than the price that they paid. And so, you know, in financial services as an example, You might have, you know, using automation and AI and sort of robo managers, right? It loses that human touch, but is the experience good enough where the customer feels like, the client feels like, I very quickly can get the answer I need. I don't have to schedule an hour of my time. I can do it at the convenience of, you know, 2 o'clock in the morning or on a Saturday or on a Sunday, and I can get what I need. Is the experience good? And maybe your fees are a little higher than someone else's fees, you know, at competing brokerage, but the experience is so good, I'm willing to pay the extra point or two because that experience matters to me. And so customers will remember it, they're willing to pay more money for it, and it engenders a deep sense of loyalty where it's harder to get them to switch based on quote unquote price. Like no fees, when I hear people advertise like no fees or zero fees or we don't charge this kind of fees, it's like, Look, unless you have exactly the same experience and service, then maybe it's interesting that you don't charge me any fees. But if I'm giving up something from an experience standpoint that's important to me, not the job to be done, not the solution, but the experience, you know, it's like go to a really great restaurant and it's amazing food and the service is bad. Would you go back?

Probably not.

If you're in an Uber, do you remember what you paid? Or do you remember if the music was loud and the car was dirty and the driver was driving aggressively? You remember those things. You don't remember what you paid.

Right?

And so that's the example. So I started with customer experience. Now to the second part of your question, yes, I completely missed employee. Completely. I need to go back to my manuscript and, 'cause I've said this now a couple times and I need to look, did I even put the word employee in the book? I will find out that answer.

I can search my Kindle version of it.

You should go ahead and search it if, if you got a second, but I will look as well. But I missed employee and I think that I needed to work here to understand that cultural lever from a growth perspective, that Salesforce is one of the best places to work globally. If it's not number one, it's in the top five. It's one of the most innovative companies in the world, and it's the fastest growing enterprise software company. So I made that statement and I said to our CMO, I want to go prove this. Can I prove this? That if we're highly engaged and satisfied as employees, we're willing to go the extra mile for customers. We're willing to do the things, we're looking for innovation, we're driving for excellence. We get those growth rates that, others maybe don't enjoy. So that connection between employee and customer is sort of the fastest way to get customers to love your brand is get employees to love their job. That was not in Growth IQ. So it led me down this 2-year research path, and here we are talking about employee and customer experience.

Now, how do most companies today think about prioritizing the employee experience versus the customer experience? What has your research found there?

Look, it was right at the— it was kind of March. We kicked off the first project in January, February, March of 2020. So like the pandemic had not even— right, it was sort of a low rumble, if you will. If you were traveling internationally, you were a little bit aware that something was going on. But if you were domestically in the United States, January, February, maybe not so aware. And when we kicked it off, I had no idea looking forward, like 12 months, that the great resignation would happen. And in reflection, looking back and looking at the research, I'm not surprised that that's what happened because employees have been upset. They've felt neglected. They've felt like there's been no investment. There's no sort of connection. A lot of it was a paycheck. It was a grind. It's like, look, I'm in my car 3 hours a day to get here to just be brated. Like, I don't feel psychologically safe. I don't feel heard. I don't feel valued. I'm out. And the research showed that those things were true. So I'm not surprised. I don't use great resignation. I actually use great reflection, because I think people stopped and reflected on what's important. What do I want out of work that takes 92,000 hours of my lifetime away from me? Literally, that's how many if you work sort of, you know, from sort of your 20s to retirement. And the research found that one, people were not connecting those two. And we found it globally. So we went across 6 countries and the first study was US only, the second study was global, that there was no connection. Number two, nobody owned employee experience. And that even though executives were saying employees are important to us, it was at the expense of, but always do, and take care of the customer first. I don't want you to hear it's employee first and customer second. I'm actually not saying that, and I'm not saying that there needs to be a new role created. What I am saying is that there has to be this shift in operating philosophy away from it's customer first and customer only and sort of employees be damned. Sorry that we give you 7 tools to do your job, none of which talk to each other. Sorry, we don't invest in your career and take, you know, what you want out of work, you know, as something that's important to us. You know, sorry that we don't, you know, I could go on and on, that the processes are broken and, you know, you have to manually work your way through things, but do whatever it takes for the customer. And I think that it's been an incredible experience for me to learn all that I've learned over the last 2 years. Now it's how do I tell this story in a way that gets people to go, I now, I want to do something, right? We started this podcast out with Change Is Hard. And so this next book I'm working on right now is really the tip of the spear of change. And when you start talking about people change, it's really hard.

Yeah. Well, so like you say, it's not an either or, it's not employee experience or customer experience, it's both and type thing. And so we've got to focus on both of those. So let's dig a little deeper. Into some of the research I looked at here that Salesforce has put out, and I'm sure it probably came from you or you were heavily involved in it. You talk about these 5 core elements of the employee experience. So I want to walk through each of those here. The first one is trust. Then we've got C-suite accountability, alignment, recognition, and seamless technology. So let's start with trust. Is that the first one that we should be starting with? And what do you mean by trust as it relates to the employee experience?

A lot of this has to do with, do I feel valued? Do I feel heard? Do I feel invested in? Do I feel like there is a connected relationship between my employer and me, that they care about me genuinely? Trust has been at an all-time low over the last couple of decades, even before the pandemic, but the Edelman Trust Barometer actually bumped businesses up to being sort of the most trusted as governments didn't do such a great job over the last 2 years with the response to the pandemic. So that means there's a lot of responsibility on businesses to show up in an empathetic, compassionate, right, those words that make people feel a little bit uncomfortable because, well, how do you measure empathy and how do you measure compassion? And right, they get into that conversation. But Trust at the high level is those things, right? Do I feel valued? Do I feel heard? Do I feel like my employer is going to invest in me? And very specifically, there's so much else that goes into trust, but we're talking about the connection point between employee and customer. So very specific kind of moment in time, right? Not the whole relationship. So I, you know, just want to qualify that, right?

And so these 5 that we're talking about here, these are the aspects of the employee that impact customer experience and growth. So that's really the connection that we're making here. So first one, trust. Second one is C-suite accountability. How does that come into play?

Oh yeah, this is a good one. As I said, nobody owns EX. So if nobody owns it, nobody's doing anything, right? There's no accountability. There's no sort of, I say one thing, employees are the most important thing to me, but focus on the customers. Or, you know, I want to communicate out, you know, one thing from a C-suite perspective, but the C-suite is not connected to what in fact the employees want from them or want from the company. And so a lot of that is very basically kind of, you know, do what you say, say what you do. But sometimes, you know, I'll even use this one example that there's a study by PwC, this wasn't by us, that literally showed that the top 3 business growth metrics for the long term are like customer satisfaction, customer engagement, employee engagement, those 2. And yet they don't have any correlation to their compensation package.

A little disconnect there.

A little disconnect there. So, you know, that's it. That's accountability in a nutshell.

Yeah. Now, in your experience, do you find that for most organizations, large organizations in particular here, that the chief human relations officer reports directly to the CEO, or are they maybe one level removed from the CEO?

Yeah, and I think that that has a lot to do with this nobody owns EX. You know, I have done roundtables now around the globe for the last year and a half, and I asked chief human resource officers or chief people officers, right, whoever was responsible for HR, did they think that they owned EX? First, they'd say, define what you mean by EX, that is employee experience. Then they'd say, well, I own pieces of it. Obviously, I'm responsible for talent management, so recruitment and onboarding. But then, you know, outside of the, you know, pay, benefits, I'm kind of out. I'm not involved in their day-to-day unless there's an issue, right? And then I have to come in and manage them through either, you know, something that happened or get them back on track or whatever it might be. If there's a concern, those kinds of things. But the day-to-day of an employee, let me just pick technology because it's one of those elements and it's the last one, so I don't want to sort of give away that thunder. But that, as an example, how often does the HR person talk to the IT person about that relationship, right, of, well, today it's pretty hard to do anything with a customer without tech. You might say, well, okay, construction workers, right, there are where someone is doing labor, you know, they're not seeing the homeowner, they're not engaging with the homeowner. So yes, there are outliers to this, but for the mean, it's hard to do it without technology. So that one question tells me a lot about how far down this path they are to understanding how the decisions that they make as an executive team have a positive or negative impact on those employees. I don't want you to hear that I am talking about ownership or control. Or budget. This is a philosophical shift. This is— it doesn't matter, I don't own it. We have to make sure we're delivering great experiences for our employees.

And the third core element here is alignment. So what are we aligning here?

Yeah, so that's a great lead-in from the previous response I just gave, is okay, so now let's talk about that alignment between someone in HR someone in IT, and let's say someone who owns customer experience. So, you know, is it a chief customer officer, a chief marketing officer? Once again, chief, if you're a small company, you're like, I do all 3 things. So I get it, not everyone has individual roles, but think about the remit that those people would have or those roles would have. So I'm just gonna combine those. So HR, IT, and customer, putting those 3 together from an alignment standpoint, what are our goals? What are the metrics? Are we sharing metrics? What does it mean to deliver a great EX? How does that impact CX? Are we doing net promoter scores for our customers? Are we doing any kind of employee score for our employee? Are we seeing that our net promoter scores are going up, but our employee satisfaction scores are going down? How is that possible? Well, because your employees are working harder to get done what they need to get done. They're putting on a lot more effort. You've done a lot of things to make it easier for the customer, But unfortunately, the unintended consequence was you made it harder for your employee. So let's get alignment on how do we make sure that we're not out of balance between the things we do for customers and the things we do for employees.

I find this is an area that many leaders have a lot of difficulty with in terms of how do they cascade this alignment throughout the whole organization. And I suspect in the book that you're working on that this is going to be an area that you address, but things like the vision of the company, the purpose of the organization, just trying to get everybody aligned on what that is and feel a part of it and feel like they have the ability to impact that. For example, take purpose. It's like, okay, well, we think we've got a purpose for the company and we're trying to get everyone aligned to it. But before people can get engaged with a purpose, their life has got to be right, so to speak. It's like, you know, are their physical needs being met? Like, what's their home life like? Are their emotional needs being met? Is the environment that they're working in— is it the right environment where they feel comfortable and they feel productive? Do they have good Wi-Fi? That sort of thing. Do they have a quiet place if they're working remotely? And so I think oftentimes we jump quickly to the big thing, like, let's get aligned on this. Without going back to the employee experience. Like, what are they really feeling? What are they really needing right now? And are those things taken care of? Kind of getting back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We got to get all that basic stuff done before we can look at these higher ideals of vision and purpose. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. And that's why the sort of alignment of executives that play a part in each of the questions you just asked. Like, is it HR's responsibility that if we're going to come up with a work-from-home policy that we know all those things? Are we going to pay for Wi-Fi for people at home? Are we going to buy them desks and comfortable chairs and, you know, webcams and microphones and all the things they need to be effective and efficient working from home? Are we going to decide that we are going to pay for those things, or are we just going to tell them they have to pay for it? Well, it's already tight out there, you know, and not everyone has the ability to do those things. Like, I took a garage and it's a full-blown studio. Not everyone has the ability to do that. I think that that is absolutely right. So first thing I'd say in what you just pointed out is you have to ask your employees. Those are the right questions to be asking them, not, are you happy? Would you refer us to a friend? Like, well, that's interesting, and it's good for you to pat your back that our employees are satisfied. Yes, no. Does that tell you all the things you just asked? I would argue it does not. So you'd have to be willing to ask those questions. Now, you cannot just ask and do nothing with it. So this is also part of trust and alignment and C-suite accountability, these first 3. If you're going to ask them, then you have to action something. You can't say, well, everything you said we're not doing. Then don't ask. Or ask them and you look at it and then you don't communicate back what you're doing. Like, this goes back to trust, right? They ask me, they care about my opinion, they listen to my feedback. The other thing we found in that C-suite accountability is when HR executives are actually planning things for employees, only 10% ask employees what they want. So they're making decisions without even asking, which goes back to this, I don't trust my employer. Like, you know, they change their mind every day. Like, I'm not involved. They're not asking me my opinion. All of those things play a part in the disconnect between employee experience and customer experience.

I'm glad you brought up that point there about asking questions. And I heard you say on another show that you have to become a master asker.

Yes.

And I think that's so right. And in a previous episode that we did with Eric Pleiner of YSC Consulting, this idea of asking someone's opinion on something, one of the things he said that I thought was really insightful was he said, look, if you're going to ask somebody's opinion on something, you should set some context. Meaning, am I asking for their voice? Meaning, hey, I just want to know what you think. Am I giving them a veto? Meaning I'm asking them for something and they have the ability to veto whatever we decide to do. Or am I giving them a vote? Meaning, hey, you're one of a number of people that I'm asking, and your vote or your opinion will be taken into consideration here, but you don't have a veto. So I think that's important too, to set the context. And like you say, you've got to do something with the information when you ask them. But I think it's important to, to set some context on what am I going to do with the feedback that you're giving me here?

Yeah. And another stat we found out of that is that many don't even know how to use the data that they're collecting to this point. So they're collecting the data and then they don't know what to do with it. And so, look, I don't want you to hear, oh, this is more technology, this is more for me to do, this is more money. I'll give you an example. I was having a conversation with Michelle Romanow, who is a dragon on Canada's Dragon's Den, which is like the US's Shark Tank. And she is a double unicorn, so $2 billion companies, and she's like 36. I feel like a complete underachiever when I talk to her. But anyway, I digress. She set up something called the stupid stuff. She used another word, the stupid stuff we do at, and her company name,.com. And at the time she had 100 or so employees and said, like, what, you know, as we've grown and we've grown really quickly, what have we done that's made it harder for you? And lo and behold, it was just low-hanging fruit of things like they didn't know that they made people still do this when they did that. They should have eliminated this process, or this technology no longer integrated with that technology. Like, let's get it fixed. Or I have to fill out 5 things and fax it in like it's 2020, you know. So sometimes it can be something as simple as that. Set up a Slack channel, set up an email box, whatever it whatever it might be. But to your point, say, are there— if there's one thing we could do to make your job easier every single day, what would it be? Like, that one question will lead you down a lot of different paths, but I guarantee you, you're going to start to hear some consistency, and it will land us in the fifth element when we get there.

And the fourth one here is recognition.

I want to know that what I'm doing is valued and you appreciate my work. And, you know, do I have an opportunity to be promoted internally? Do I have an opportunity to be, you know, tapped for management development? Are you investing in me? You know, do I feel like I have an opportunity to shine as an employee? You know, people want to know that their work, that it matters. And, you know, if you're a call center rep, I just want everyone to put on their customer hat for a moment and just remember the last time you called into a call center and had a really bad experience. Did you get frustrated with the person on the other end? Were you like, ah, Can't you just like, I don't need all these things. Like, stop asking me all these questions. Like, it's not that employee's fault. They are following a script. They are held to do certain productivity metrics. Let's go back to your very first question of input. They have to input all this information into their system. You know, they cannot be on the phone longer than 5 minutes. They have to answer in 10 seconds, right? They have to do all these things. And then you as the customer are totally frustrated and take it out on them. And they do that for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. It sucks. So I want you to recognize that what I'm doing matters. And so is it you're going to recognize I took a really tough call, and although the client was upset, I did everything right? Like, go in and make those call listenings that you usually do in call centers instead of pointing out all the things I'm doing wrong. Point out the things I'm doing right as well. You know, there was just an article out about a very large e-commerce retailer. I think it's— if it's not number 1, number 2, or number 3 largest company in the world, you can figure out who it is— about what they do for their warehouse employees. Once again, you can figure out who it is. And it literally was like by the minute. If you showed up 4 minutes late from your break, you got written up. If you were supposed to do 175 pieces packed in boxes in an hour and you did, you know, 168, you got written up. It was very much— that is not a recognition. That is not, we value you. That is, you are a widget in the cog of this wheel and it is all about productivity. Sort of very Industrial Revolution 2.0, not, you know, 2022, where that shouldn't be the way we approach our employees.

Well, and here's where we're all hypocrites, Tiffany, because we all know who that company is. We all highly value the service that company provides. And by golly, if they're 3 hours late in getting my package delivered, or they— I get an email says it's going to be a day later than I expected, we're all upset. And so on the one hand, we highly value the quick service that they deliver, but then we sort of forget about the back end of the people who actually have to do the work to make sure that I get my package that quickly. So we want our cake and eat it too, I think. But I think we also— this gets back to empathy. I think you touched on empathy a little bit earlier. It's that, you know, put ourselves in the shoes of our vendor. And when we're calling that customer service line and we're frustrated because they can't do what we want or whatever, it's like, okay, I may be the fifth difficult conversation they've had in the last 30 minutes. And so cut them some slack. And I think so often we don't do that, that we just put ourselves in their shoes and that recognition that, hey, maybe they're having a bad day. Maybe they got in a fight with their spouse before they got to the office that day. So we have to understand that a lot of things can go on here and we need to recognize that.

Yeah, well, you know, some of this is based in— let's go back to C-suite accountability and trust and sort of the conversation we had, you know, a few minutes ago about the and play and not the or play. It was, we want to be the most customer-centric company on the planet. That was the mantra, right? Customer first.

Didn't say employees.

Nope, did not, right? And then on the way out the door, now we want to be the best employer on the planet because of this disconnect, right? You can't keep doing what you're doing and then expect— because you are nothing without the employees, right?

And I think what we find with a lot of these management strategies and ideas is that A lot of them can work for some period of time. I think General Electric is an example. We go back to Jack Welch. He had a, what, a 20-year run, incredible run for 20 years. And a lot of folks looking back in hindsight would say some of his strategies were definitely not human-friendly. And so he leaves and the next guy comes in, and here we are today. I think the company is essentially dismantling because it just didn't work. So a lot of these can work for a period of time, just like at the company we've been describing here. It's worked very, very well, but now they need to flip a little bit and understand, "Hey, we gotta take care of the people here too." What I'm playing with is sort of a way to tell this story.

Look, there's a reason why I didn't use the name. I mean, we can all figure out who it is, but— Right. This is not about, I want to embarrass or call out or talk down to or be sort of the sideline quarterback. It has everything to do with the conversation of just like what you just said. We expect the hour and we don't get it. We don't think about that example I just gave about maybe my package was the one that he only got to 168 and I was number 169. He didn't get to it in time, and so my package didn't make it out on time, right? It isn't always a robot. And so, you know, you now have to with this sort of understanding is say, okay, hold on a second. I will still be loyal to the brand, but I want them to do better. And so now you're— we're kind of paying attention to, we want them to do better. We want them to do better.

Right. I mean, the same thing with pricing. I mean, there's another big company that we don't need to mention, but known for low prices. Well, how do we get the low prices? Well, we browbeat the vendors to get the lowest prices from them. And then those vendors have to go and build their products in low-wage countries. And it's just a ripple effect. And so again, we have to think through the ramifications of all these things that we demand here in this environment that we live in, at least in, you know, the first world country here in the United States, that we have all these high expectations, but there are ramifications to the high expectations.

Yes. You know, one of the things around customer experience Now we've had this deluge of, I want it now, I want it instantaneously, this deluge of returns. There's billions of dollars worth of returns that are making it into landfills. Clothes, we've got a deluge of things that might have been stuck at sea for the last year right before the supply chain, and now we've got more than we can deal with. So it's either discount or throw away, or they don't end up in landfills here, they end up in landfills somewhere else. And so this sort of, I want to have it, I want to have it now, We definitely need to balance it.

We do. All right. So the fifth one here, seamless technology. We've been dancing around this one a little bit. So tell me, how does that play into this?

This was the largest disconnection between employee and C-suite. So we asked sort of what are the biggest challenges to a company's growth? And we asked the employees and they said team members leaving, you know, so like people on my team are leaving. It's disruptive to me to do what I need to do. Like they were our star performer or it was my manager or it's my best friend. It has impact. Tied for number 1 was outdated technology, like just to do my job. We asked the C-suite the same thing, and they listed technology as number 6 as the, you know, biggest challenge to finding company growth. So that was the biggest sort of disconnect between employee and C-suite. Some of that has to do with the fact that the C-suite does not use the technology that employees use. Right? Someone else does it, and they get a spreadsheet or a report on their desk, and so they think everything's great. But they don't realize that the average enterprise has 900 unique applications all up, and only 27% of them are integrated. Now, some of those will never be— finance, HR, probably, right, not to be ever integrated. But let's just say, and if you're a small business, let's say you have 100 apps. How many are integrated? If you sit in your call center, how many different applications does your employee, your agent need to hop through to get something done? And are they entering data into multiple? Let's go back to your very first question. This is an input problem, right? This is a data problem. This is a process problem. This is an integration problem. And it increases effort for employee while on the customer side, it's seamless and it's frictionless. And we've been trying to make the experience really good and All of those things for the customer fell on the shoulders of the employee having to then deliver against that promise that the brand has made from a customer experience standpoint. So once again, you know, it's not lost on me. Obviously I work at Salesforce. We could solve a lot of those problems from the portfolio and the acquisitions we've made, but it is people and process, not tech. And so it's, do you have the right people in the right roles? Do you have the right processes supporting it? Have you over-customized your technology? Have you integrated them? I could go on for hours on this particular conversation or this particular aspect of these 5. But I would say this is where we get very excited about the shiny things and we just toss it out without any understanding of what kind of additional work that puts on the shoulders of our people.

Here's what's really hard about this one, and I hope that you can address this in your new book. And that is with technology, it's— we're always in a state of becoming. I'm old enough to remember VisiCalc. So I started with VisiCalc, and then I go to Lotus 1-2-3, and then I go to Excel, and so on, and Google Sheets, and so on and so on. It's like, it's always changing. How do we think about the balance between, I want modern technology, but I can't keep swapping it out every 2 or 3 years because I can never get proficient at anything because it's always constantly changing. So I think there's this continuous tension between, I want to have good technology, I don't want to be on the bleeding edge, maybe don't even want to be on the leading edge. I want to be on a comfortable edge. How do we think about that balance there?

Yeah, I'm old enough to actually say that I used to work with Dan Brinkner, who created Visi-Cal.

Yep. So we're dating ourselves here.

We are dating ourselves here. This is not a pursuit of new tech for new tech's sake. Let's go back to the job to be done. What is the job to be done that you're trying to do? I want to build stronger relationships with my customers. Let's say that that's the, you know, job to be done. Okay, now I need to back into it. I need personalized, predictive. I need to know what products and services they have. I don't want to over-communicate. I want to make sure that when I send something from marketing, you know, that it doesn't conflict with the fact that they have a sales ticket open So I'm not trying to market them something new while, you know, they have a problem with us. Like, right, you're going to deconstruct this quote-unquote customer journey that you want to have. Now, once you understand that, now it's like, okay, what technology can help me do that in a more seamless, frictionless, scalable way where I'm removing a lot of the inconsistencies? So let's say 80% of it will be automated and 20% of it needs human touch or something like that. That's what you should be solving to, not like, oh, I need this particular technology because it's the latest and greatest for this other thing. But is it still relevant in that job to be done? Do we no longer need to do that? What's the most important of it? Do I really need to replace this, or do I just need to integrate it with something else so that I can— Those are the questions that we need to have and need to be doing. But let's go back to that kind of work group of, HR, customer, IT to get together and say, okay, we're thinking of doing this. Okay, then someone needs to go, what's the impact to the employee? And someone needs to go, what's the impact to the customer? Who is going to look at the processes and make sure that we're not breaking existing processes or overloading processes? Or do we no longer need that process because this technology is going to do that? That's the conversation that's not happening. A lot of times tech is thrown over the wall to the employee. Here you go, here's the new tool. Potentially without any training, any understanding why they're using it. Once again, it's an input mechanism. What's the output of it? How's it making my life easier? And a lot of this has to do with, you know, the C-suite feeling like if they're not up on the latest, that they're at some disadvantage. But the people that will win will be those that use technology better than those that do not, even if those that do not have spent more on technology than those that are doing it better.

I love how you frame that in terms of thinking about the technology that we want or that we need in the frame of the job to be done. So it's not like you say, it's not like, well, let's just get the latest and greatest technology because we want to say we're a technology company and the marketplace is going to give us a much higher multiple because look at all this great technology that we have and look at all this AI that we've got. It's like, no, it's like, what's the job to be done? What's the problem that we're trying to solve? Work backwards, as you described, and then maybe our existing technology works really well. And we can continue with this longer. So again, we always have to strike that balance between the new and making good use of what we already have. So appreciate that. All right, Tiffany, I know we're getting ready to wrap up here. I have one other question that I'd like to ask you. And this is a question that came from a previous guest. And the previous guest has no idea who the guest that this question was going to be asked to. So the question is, what do you think will happen that most people think is unlikely to happen?

I don't know if people don't think it will happen anymore, but I definitely think that the city as we know it today will be very different. Like, the city of where we go to work, like downtown, whatever, is where we go to work. I feel like we need these sort of satellite downtowns in, you know, to give people a place to go where they feel like they belong, right? If there's 10 employees that live in this area and we all get together and we don't go to the downtown office, but we have this little satellite office to really stay connected to each other. I'm not a fan of everyone works— I've worked remote now and worked from home for over 15 years, but I'm out all the time. If I just worked at home and never left and saw people that were work-related, it would be very hard for me. I would say that I feel like the future of work will continue to be decentralized, if you will, but what that looks like I don't think is going to be home and office. I think it's going to be different. I think it will be— we've just opened something called Trailblazer Ranch, where literally it's a ranch. I think it's like 80 or 100 people can stay there, and it has wellness centers and training centers and outdoor activities. That's very different than let's get together for an all-hands meeting or a team meeting in a conference room around a table and have really bad food brought in, right? This is a let's go to the ranch and, you know, connect as humans and do things that are a balance between work and personal and well-being and mental health. And those kinds of things I think will happen more and more. I think people would have said 2 years ago that'll never happen. And then now I think more and more people are leaning into it. So that might be a little more obvious, but that's what I hope happens.

Yeah, and I think a lot of things that were bubbling under the surface prior to the pandemic were just completely accelerated overnight as a result of the pandemic. So yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how all of these things unfold over the coming years. And I think we've just— we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg here in terms of the changes that the pandemic is going to cause as it relates to the way work is done, where work is done, how much work is done, what's important to people. How leaders treat their employees and view and value their employees. So I think there's all kinds of massive changes. I'm hopeful and optimistic that these are going to be positive changes that are long overdue, but time will tell.

Absolutely. Well, great question. I had to really think.

All right. Okay. Well, Tiffany, what's the best way for folks to connect with you and how can they stay in touch with all the great work that you and the folks at Salesforce are doing?

Yeah, so I'm pretty active on social media. So follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram, probably where I'm the most active. You can download the reports. The first one was called The Experience Equation, uh, so you can search that. Uh, the second one was The Experience Advantage. I'm sure you're going to put them in the show notes, but that's the second one. Uh, the book was Growth IQ. I've got a podcast called What's Next with Tiffany Bova. So those are sort of really the ways in which, uh, you can keep in touch with my work.

Excellent. All right, Tiffany, thank you for being on the show.

Thanks for having me.

As a company leader, it's easy to default to saying that we are a customer-centric company, or we always put the client first. But as the pandemic has clearly shown, if you don't take care of your employees and make sure that their core needs are taken care of, then they'll just simply leave. What Tiffany's work has shown is that there is a direct connection between the employee experience that you create, the customer customer experience that those employees then deliver. And the result of that connection is a quantifiable increase in your sales. Taking good care of your employees is not just the right thing to do, it's also good for your business. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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