Tiffani Bova: Adopt an Experience Mindset as a Startup Founder
Tiffani Bova, Head of Growth at Salesforce, presents research linking employee and customer experience to revenue growth. Companies with high EX and CX see 8.5% annual growth versus 4.3% for low-performers. She advises founders to involve employees in tech decisions, avoid silos, and listen continuously to capture feedback.
Chapters
Hello everybody, welcome to today's Founder Institute webinar. We are especially excited because we have invited today a best-selling author and innovation evangelist that will share her concept about experience mindset. But before I invite her on stage and we tell you who she is, let me introduce myself. My name is Emilia and I'm a content manager Jared Founder Institute. I'm currently based in Sofia, and I know that we have a global audience, so please use the chat on the right-hand side to share with us where you're joining from. Let me open and see. We have people from Spain, Ethiopia, so it's very interesting, Los Angeles, Germany, welcome, welcome everybody. A few things on housekeeping and our agenda for today. First, our guest speaker is going to present for about 20-30 minutes, then you can ask her your questions. So please use the Q&A section next to the chat. Don't post in the chat because we're gonna lose them in the chat. So publish your questions in the Q&A section and then we're gonna put them on stage. We will answer a few of them and after that we will have networking session that will go for as long as you like on airmeet tables. Before we start also, we also want to ask you one question to know more about you. And we created this poll that I'm going to publish now. Please vote. The question is: how many employees do you currently have in your company? Are you up to 5, 5 to 10, or more than 10? The voting is live and we see now that most of the companies are quite small, more than 80%, but we also have bigger and 5 to 10 people. Okay, I will hide this from stage for now, but you can still vote and We can discuss this later. And it's time to introduce you our speaker today, Tiffany Bova. She is the head of growth and innovation at Salesforce and also author of the book The Experience Mindset, that we would love to hear more about. Hi Tiffany, welcome.
Hello everybody, joining you from Los Angeles, California. So it's wonderful to see such an amazing global audience. Thank you for joining us.
Okay, I am going to disappear now and the floor is yours. See you in a bit. Yes, you're already using the emojis. They are right under the screen so you can express your emotions.
All right, excellent. Well, thank you so much for the kind introduction. And thank you, everybody, for joining. I know for some of you it's very, very late in the day. It's the beginning of the day here in the United States, in California it's 10 AM. But I'm going to spend a little bit of time sharing with you some recent research that we produced, and it became the foundation for my book, The Experience Mindset, that just came out. On June 6th, so she's still only about 6 or 7 weeks old. It's been amazing to see and hear the feedback from people that have had the opportunity to read it thus far. But I know that we're going to go into Q&A after my presentation, so please don't forget to just post your question, and then the team will get those to me when I'm finished. While some of this research may feel like it is for larger organizations or organizations that have more complexity. I would say this, that I believe startups and founders are really the heartbeat of the businesses that will be in the future. And so the way in which we organize today, the decisions that we make today will have implications to the health and well-being of the business in the future. So if the majority of you have less than 5 employees, you may say, look, I do everything right. I wear multiple hats. I am the CEO. I am the head of sales. I am the head of marketing. I am legal. I am HR. Right. You might be playing all of those roles. So as you start to think about who should I hire next, when do I hire, what kind of company do I want to build, I hope that this presentation will help you. Now, let me give you a little bit of context of who I am. As was mentioned, I'm the global growth evangelist at Salesforce. But prior to being here at Salesforce, I was a research fellow at a company called Gartner, which is the world's largest analyst and consulting firm for technology companies around the world. And I'd say about 20% or 25% of my customers during that 10-year period were startups from all over, you know, asking me questions about when do I hire my first salesperson or how do I best establish partnerships with larger organizations. So, I have spent quite a bit of time around startups from an advisory standpoint. But prior to that, I actually was a salesperson, a marketer, and a customer service leader for both startups all the way up to Fortune 500 companies in the United States. And I've always had a global remit. So, it's given me an incredible sort of front row seat to understand what are the things that businesses should be thinking about in order to set themselves up for success, as I said. So again, please post your questions if you have any, and I'm going to get started on the presentation. So the first thing I'd say is that building a modern growth organization requires us to think a little bit differently. If this is your first organization or first company, it's your first-time founder, you don't have any if you will, bad habits, or you don't have any ways in which you've always operated that you default to when things get challenging or when things are going well. Having this beginner's mind works to your advantage because you're open to try things without having some preconception of how it will be, you know, effective or not. But I want to ground this entire discussion in this one quote. That the fastest way to get your customers to love your brand, your company, your products, your services is to get your employees to love their job. Now, when I first started sharing this quote, what was interesting was how many people, leaders specifically, would say, what is love their job? Like, I can't measure that. I can't manage that. I feel like my employees are satisfied and happy and willing to go the extra mile for the business and for the customers, that they're committed to the vision and values of the organization. And I say, well, that sort of encompasses all the things I would define underneath that. But we spend almost a third of our lives at this thing called work. It's something like 90,000 hours. And there's this old saying that when you pass away, you know, if you believe in being buried in the ground and you're going to have a headstone at the, at the, at the, you know, at the head of your, of your gravesite, it is not going to have your bank account. It is not going to have your business name. It's going to have sort of how you lived your life. Were you kind? Did you care? Did you make the world a better place? If you were a business owner, did you help lift up those people that worked for you? It has so much to do with how do we create businesses and companies that leave the world a better place because we were there. And I think if you can create that kind of philosophy, you will attract those kinds of employees. And if they love what they do, it works out better for you. They work harder to design products. They will help customers when needed, even if they don't know how. They will go get it done. They're willing to maybe design things with a different eye, be more inclusive, remove biases, use technology as was intended. Whatever the case might be, the goal here is you want to attract and retain the best talent you can. The experience imperative, if you will. This slide I've been using for a number of years now, and it really came about from my work at Gartner, where we began to say in about 2008 that we believed experience that a customer has with your company, whatever that means, right? How they buy from you, your website, using your products and services, you know, calling into your call center, you know, visiting with a salesperson you might have or coming to your offices, that those experiences would become as important as the products and services you were selling. As a matter of fact, some of our research shows that 88% of customers feel the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. So we can't just think about what it is we make and then sell, even if we don't make it. You understand what I mean there? Companies do two things. I'm oversimplifying here. They make stuff and they sell stuff. Everything else is in support of those two things. If you don't have revenue or capital, it's very difficult to make things. If you don't have revenue and capital, it's very difficult to sell something. It isn't that revenue and income and sales is the only focus. It is required if you want to build a healthy and sustainable business. So, we have to expand our mind beyond the products and services that we're selling and think about those experiences that we have to deliver to our customers. Now, who are the keepers of the promises you make as a company? I'm sure many of you have a business plan and a presentation that you'll either use to go raise money or to, you know, share with customers about what it is that you do, why your products or services are so great. But whatever it is you say on that PowerPoint presentation, whatever it is that you say on your website, we are the best at something, we are the leader in something. We want to be the best at this. Who are the keepers of that promise, that customer experience promise you make as a leader, as a company, both in, in your presentations, but more importantly, when you're sitting in front of customers? It is your employees. If you have one employee, then it's that employee. They represent your company. Every single day. If you have 2, 3, 4, 5 employees, it starts to get more difficult as you get larger in order to make sure that those employees are representing the company that you built in the sort of way and manner in which you want it to be represented. Those employees are the keepers of the promise you make as a founder. So who you hire, when you hire, how you hire, and then more importantly, how you create a working environment that fosters the kind of behavior that brings forward the best experience, not only for your customers, but for your vendor partners, your suppliers, the communities you may serve. So don't ever lose sight of the fact that a company is made up of people, and those people tend to be employees. You are the employer. The relationship between the two of you has huge implications to your ability to achieve those goals that you aspire to achieve. Now, this is a study done by a company named— called Edelman, and they do something called the Edelman Trust Barometer. And it looks across all markets and segments and size organizations. And for the last 10 years, it has said that customer is the number one priority stakeholder for businesses to ensure long-term success. Now, this isn't just found in a small solopreneurs or even, you know, very small or micro businesses. This is all the way up to global enterprises. For the first time, employees took over that number one spot over customers. Now, why is that? I mean, we could say, listen, I don't know what it is that, that you are doing, but at the end of the day, it is absolutely— you are absolutely responsible for making sure that those things are happening and happening effectively. Effectively. So employees, unfortunately, are not always happy. So let me sort of spread that out a little bit. Great Resignation, which was a phenomenon we saw in the United States, and now we're talking about something called quiet quitting. That is where employees might show up, collect a paycheck, and then that's all they do. They're not willing to go that extra mile with the customers or for the organization or even to collaborate more effectively. That is where we have to think differently about what are the things we can do to make employees happier. So now let me just share this one slide. Now you may say, look, I only have 2 or 3 employees. I don't have a lot of technology. I don't have a lot of processes. I don't have a lot of tech bloat, right? Meaning you don't have a lot of systems in place. But ultimately, what we need to make sure is, remember, you are building an organization. So let's make the right decisions out of the gate immediately so that we ensure you are prepared for hypergrowth in the future. Or even if you're in the middle of growing very quickly right now, What are the things that you can do to ensure that that is happening? So I want to call out a couple of things here. Technology is the lifeblood of any organization today. So what are the things that we can do in order to— so someone just said the screen is frozen. I'm not, I'm not frozen on my end. So hold on.
Hi, Tiffany. Yes, sorry to interrupt. It's frozen, but we can hear you very well. Maybe if you refresh. We don't see the slides as well.
I don't know why. Can you hear me?
Yes, we hear you very clearly, but we don't see slides and it's frozen, basically.
Am I frozen?
Yes. Maybe you can try—
I just checked my— Yeah, I checked my internet connection and it's extremely fast, so, um, it's not me on my end. Hi everybody, sorry, I'm not sure what happened. Uh, I have really fast internet connection, so I just did a test, so I'm not sure where it's happening. Anywho, I had to refresh, so all right, so looks and sounds great. So, uh, I will— let me, let me Let me, let me back up because you guys started seeing, having issue about right here. So, all right. We'll try one more time. So, I'm sorry if you guys heard this. I don't know where it started to get rocky, but thank you for hanging in there. OK. All right. So, what I was saying here is there was a study by a group called Edelman that for the last decade, they've been saying that customers are the number one priority stakeholder. For businesses to ensure long-term success. And so if you think about customers, it could be 1 customer, 5 customers, 10 customers, whatever the case might be. As you are thinking about how to grow your business, I want you to keep this in mind. Being customer-centric, being obsessed about your customers is an amazing strategy to have. However, we cannot forget about the employees. They are the keepers of your customer experience promise. They are the keepers of all the things you say as a founder. I want to be the best company in this product category, or I want to do amazing work here, or I want to have, you know, the best customer service in my industry. Whatever the case might be, You have a statement about what kind of company you want to build. And so this is where we have an opportunity for you to understand that whatever you may say on a PowerPoint slide in front of investors or potential customers gets delivered by your employees. It isn't your PowerPoint slide or your tagline or your values or your vision or your mission statement that does that. It is your people. So they should be your number one priority. The next hire you make, the existing people you have working for you. It's really important that we make sure you give them everything that they need. And when I say everything, this is not about compensation or even benefits, depending on where you are in the world. While very important, I'm talking about the things they need to do their job. So I'm going to show you this next slide. This slide right here is a culmination of a 2-year research project that we did. And while you may say, look, we are a small organization, I'm a founder, we only have 5 people, we have 3 people, we have 2 people, I'm about to hire my first person. This is about you making sure you understand the decisions you make today will have implications to your ability to grow in the future. So let's start with, on the left side of this slide, ranked by employees, what are the top challenges to company growth? This was a global study in, I think it was 17 or 18 countries around the world. And it was all-size organizations. And so employees would say, if people leave the organization, it's very impactful to us. And so, if you have a small team and one person leaves, we have to make sure that we take care of those that are, if you will, left behind. It might have been a high performer. It might have been the person that they went to when they had an issue or had a problem or wanted to understand how to do something. So, we want to make sure that retention is really top of mind for you, especially when you're small. Because losing one of a 3-person team can be really disruptive to everything you're trying to accomplish. The next one is outdated technology. Now, as you are in the beginning of your journey, you may only have a few technology products. That's fine. But the decisions that you make about when do you replace them, do you just keep adding more technology to the mix without thinking about How do I ensure that we keep it updated and maintained and we're using the latest and greatest of whatever category of technology it is actually in? Outdated technology was number one, tied for number one by employees, because employees are the ones that are actually using that technology. They're the ones that have to navigate through those tools you choose to use. Interestingly enough, you may notice on the right-hand side is ranked by the C-suite. Now, the C-suite would be the CEO, right? Or the head of marketing, the head of sales, the head of HR, the head of it. Now, you may say, I'm a founder, I am all of those things, and I get it right. But remember, this is about setting you up for success potentially in the future, that if you are going to be really disciplined now about the decisions you make about technology. It will help you in the future. You don't want things to get outdated. You don't want things to get too complicated. You don't want things to get, um, deployed without training your people or integrating various tools. So we want to ensure that you understand that processes, technology, Departments collaborating with each other, people collaborating with each other, lack of development opportunities for those employees is a— sorry about that— is a huge opportunity for missteps from any size business. And even when I talk to very large enterprises, they may have a division that's small, might be a team of 20 people. And the rest of the company is sort of moving on and doing their day-to-day. And within this group of 20 people, they're high-performing because they're working really effectively. And so, even if a large company may be dysfunctional in many ways, there could be places and pockets where they're performing really well. And it's because they're able to do these things correctly. So remember, You know, I said this in the beginning, and I saw one of you quoted Richard Branson. Absolutely correct. This is nothing new. Happy employees, happy customer. Get those things right, you'll have greater growth. Very true. However, what we did was we actually had the opportunity to prove the fact that if you get those two things right, you have a better chance at growing. Now I'm going to go back to technology for just a second. This was once again across all size organizations. 52% of leaders believe that the technology their company provides is working effectively, which means 48% of leaders believe it isn't working effectively. Only 32% of the employees we interviewed agreed with that statement. So already we have a gap between what leaders think is happening and what the employees think is happening. But now let's go one step further and closer to the customer. Only 20% of customer-facing employees strongly agree that their company is providing great tech that is seamless and helps them collaborate easily. Remember, companies do two things. They make stuff. And they sell stuff. Again, oversimplified. But that front line of sales, marketing, and service is telling us that they do not have what they need to do their job effectively. This do more with less, AI will solve all the problems, technology is the answer isn't always the case. And it's not that I don't disagree with those things. Obviously, I work at Salesforce. I know technology can improve. The efficiency and effectiveness and productivity from, of a company and can, while be an expense, can also be a way to generate revenue and generate revenue more efficiently. But if done wrong, it falls on the shoulders of the employees who have to navigate through all of these things. And it's just not possible for them to get that right. So now, let's talk about what was really the foundation for the book, The Experience Mindset, is this concept around proving that statement that Richard Branson made as well as that I made, that when you have really happy employees, you actually get to see a growth in client satisfaction key performance indicators. And you'll see a 1.3 times greater growth in those KPIs. For customer when employee is happy, engaged, and satisfied, committed, willing, you know, and loves what they do kind of approach. If you have customer experience as a top priority, you're going to also see lift in your employees. If your customers are happy, your employees will be happier. And so you get a little bit of a lift, right? 1.4 times of employee satisfaction KPIs. But if you get both right, if you get both right and you have strong customer experience and strong employee experience, you actually get a 1.8 times faster revenue growth for doing so. That for a billion-dollar brand is about a $40 million impact. So, if you're a million-dollar brand, it could be a $40,000 impact. It can be significant. Now, I'm not saying you won't grow if you don't get these two things right. So if you look in the right, right of this, it says leaders who have high CX and EX see an 8.5% CAGR, compounded annual growth rate. Those that only get— are low on CX and EX still have a 4% CAGR, 4.35%. So it's not that you won't grow. It's that you get this amazing multiplier in getting both customer and employee experience correct. Now, when I first started sharing this research around the globe, I did about 100 roundtables with leaders across all sort of industries, size organizations. I spoke to probably 300 or 400 executives, not as part of the research, but more sharing the research initially before the book was even in my line of sight. I hadn't decided to write it yet, actually. And what I heard was the following: If it's so obvious, right? So many executives understand that a happy employee, happy customer, you get those two things right, you're going to grow. Why isn't everyone doing it? Well, we could see that these companies were US-based only in this particular study, publicly traded in this particular study. And that's so we could get access to publicly available information. If they were privately held companies or small companies, we couldn't get that publicly available information the way we can when they were publicly traded, right? What their growth rates were, what their attrition was for customers and employees, and et cetera. So, this particular study was US-only, publicly traded, large enterprise. But it's directionally correct for us to follow that if you are looking to grow, you know, ultimately, you have to keep these things in mind. Now, how do you do that? Here is— here's the COVID of the book. It's called The Experience Mindset. This is not about a promotion of the book. It's just I know some of you have been asking, do I talk about this topic? It is covered in depth. And it also walks through what are the things you can start thinking about. But I'm going to go through a few of them here. The first is to align and agree internally in your own company and maybe in your own mind, what is your definition of employee experience? What is a good employee experience to you? And I would even say, since it's not on this particular slide, what is your definition of a good customer experience? And do those things align in the definition? And I want everybody in your company to know that definition, understand that definition, agree with that definition, and ultimately understand what parts of the employee experience actually impact your customer. For example, I was with a company in Toronto a number of months back, and they told me that it took 20 minutes for a call center agent to do a return on a product. That's not a great customer experience, especially today. But it most definitely is not a great employee experience. So, if we could improve that and collapse the amount of time it took an employee to do that return, cut it down to 5 minutes, they would have a better experience. They have a better experience, guess what happens? The customer has a better experience because instead of sitting on the phone for 20 minutes, they get it solved in 5. So you have to understand what pieces of your employee experience actually has the greatest impact on customer. Think deeply about the technology decisions that you make. It's not about one brand. It's not about only choosing one company's technology so it makes it easier. It's about making sure you're choosing technology that will have the greatest impact. Impact on your business. But ensure that you solicit input from your employees on what they need the technology to do. Where can it help them get time back? Where can it help them be more productive and efficient? How can you ensure that the customer is able to do what they need to do without human intervention? Potentially? And then what do the humans who work at your organization need in order to serve the customer? How do you help the company itself collab— collaborate cross-functionally? As you get bigger, don't let silos show up in your company that this group is right here, managed by this person, and they're doing what they're doing. Then this group is managed by this person, and they're doing what they're doing. You know, et cetera. And all of a sudden, you realize that these groups, these people, these leaders are not collaborating with each other. And so, that kind of disconnection between teams manifests itself in an employee feeling like they're disconnected internally. And more importantly, the customer feels that disconnection. In that example I gave about the returns, if it takes 20 minutes, Most of that happens because it's different parts of the company that need to facilitate that return. It could be finance, then it could be the warehouse team, could be billing, right? It could be where does that return actually go? Could be the third-party shipper. You know, there's 5 or 6 groups or entities or people or teams that need to be engaged in that return. And because everything they were doing was manual, because there was no system collaboration, It just took more time than was needed. And the last is actioning feedback. This is probably the biggest one I can tell you. When you are looking for answers to big questions that you are grappling with, or big decisions that you want to make, trust me when I tell you, your employees know the answers. It's your job as leaders to ask them. Now, I want you to become what I call a master asker. Ask better questions all the time of your employees, of your partners, of your vendors, of your resellers, and of your employees. But as a leader, it isn't enough just to ask. You then have to become a master listener. You have to listen to what's being said and capture that information. You'll start to see and hear trends and early warning signals of things that you may experience in the future if you're listening close enough and you can avoid them. So many times I sit down with customers, you know, businesses around the world of all sizes, some of the largest companies in the globe, you know, regionally as well. And they'll say to me, what, what do you think I should do? What's a best practice? Improving customer experience. Or Tiffany, I believe, or I understand, or I'm curious to learn more about creating an experience mindset internally and really reimagining our operating philosophy as a company. What do you suggest that I do? And I used to answer that question right away. Like, you guys are going to— we're going to go to Q&A in a second, right? I would answer really quickly. But I think I did a little bit of a disservice because now I say, what do your employees say? What do your customers say? And I put it back on them. Because if leaders don't know the answer to those questions, if I asked you, what do your employees think about the technology you've deployed? Or what do your employees think about how you trained them when they first got hired? Or what do your customers think about the experience they have when they call your company? Would you know the answer to those questions? And if you don't know the answers to those questions, it's okay. The good news is you can start today. You can ask questions. You can carve out a half an hour a day, every single day, where you take 15 minutes and talk to an employee, or 15 minutes and you talk to a customer or a partner. Go out there, ask questions, and listen for those answers. Now, if you want to get your hands on this research, here's how you do it. On the left is the QR code for the 1.8x research that was for publicly traded U.S. companies. It will tell you and share with you what parts of the employee experience had impact on customer. In the middle, that is a retail case study we did with a very large retailer in the U.S. that saw a 50% increase in revenue per hour per employee at a retail store after they started to fix some of the aspects of the employee experience. That gave us the ability to not just say happy employee equals happy customer, but actually prove direct correlation and causation between improving employee experience driving better customer experience. And then the third one is the Experience Advantage, and that is a global study. It starts to give slices by region, by size, across attributes that are important to employee and where those disconnects are between the leaders and the individual contributors. So you can get ahold of all that. It's free to download the PDF of each of them. And then if you want to keep in touch with me, follow me on Twitter and/or LinkedIn. You can follow me. I don't have any connections left, so unfortunately, all you can do is follow. And/or Instagram. I'm also on Threads now as well. I have a YouTube channel. I've got a What's Next podcast where I interview some amazing, fun leaders from around the globe, as well as entrepreneurs and startup founders. And then I've got both my books. Growth IQ, which came out in 2018, has been translated into 12 languages around the globe—Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Obviously, The Queen's English, English. It's in Audible and Kindle as well. And my latest book, The Experience Mindset, which also just became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, you can also purchase at your favorite online bookstore. So with that, I'm going to say thank you. I'm going to stop sharing slides. And we are going to go to Q&A. So hopefully, you can all still see me. And again, I apologize for the— Bad connection. I think I just needed to refresh.
Tiffany, thank you so much for sharing all that insight and data and advice. It was plenty. And which brings us to the questions. We have quite a few. I will put on stage the ones that are voted the most. So how does an experience mindset align with other important aspects of startup culture, such as innovation and growth?
Really great question. Is it Bongani? Really great question. I would tell you that the experience mindset is a philosophy, meaning the net-net of it is, if you are going to make a decision for your customers, products, innovation, how you want to grow, entering new markets, you know, capturing new industries or new segments, whatever it might be. I want you to just pause for a second and ask yourself, what is the intended or unintended consequence to my employees? If I can get you to just ask that question, then I would have been a success. Because here's what happens. You'll make a decision like, I'm going to offer video sales calls, let's say. So, you can call and video communicate with one of my sales reps. Well, what happens if no one's in the office? Or what happens if they have a bad connection like what just happened earlier with us? I mean, ultimately, that might be great for the customer. But it puts the sales rep or the employee in a really tough situation if they don't have the ability to do a video call all the time. So, it's not that you are having to rank, is it culture and then innovation and then growth and then employee and then customer? It's not a stack rank. It's how are you going to innovate if your employees aren't happy? How are you going to grow if your customers aren't happy? What is the culture you have built? And so, in the book, I cover 4. I have people, process, and technology, which is nothing new for any of you who are business history buffs. That was really invented and facilitated and became a framework in the 1960s. But what I added at the end of it was culture. So, it's PPTC—people, process, tech, and culture—and how those 4 things have to work in harmony in order for you to innovate. So, how I came up with this concept was I said the following: I didn't think it was a coincidence Salesforce is a great place to work around the globe. It's one of the most innovative companies in the world, and it's the fastest-growing enterprise software company. I made that statement on stage, and I said, I don't think it's a coincidence. I walked off stage. I immediately sent a Slack message to our CMO at the time and said, would you fund my ability to prove that We are a great place to work, so we innovate faster. Because those two things are true, we grow faster. And that's how that Forbes Insights study happened. And then it was so positive, it led to the next study and the next study. So you are right. Culture, innovation, and growth are absolutely core to this entire conversation. But you can't do any of those things if your employees or customers aren't happy. So hopefully I answered the question.
Yes, thank you. Certainly provokes other questions. So next one from Adam. Do you have any tips on the first hire? How to best approach the recruitment? What unique features should we look for in that person?
Yes, and Adam, my book Growth IQ is actually translated in Polish as well. So you might be able to find it still. Because I see you're from Poland. You know, this is one of the biggest decisions you'll ever make, right? It's that first hire. You don't want to hire wrong. It's a lot of pressure. But I will tell you, some of the best things you can do is understand what it is you need in that hire. Why now? And what are you trying to accomplish? But whatever role you want them to have, they need to be OK with uncertainty. They need to be OK with change. They need to be OK with being uncomfortable. They need to be able to fail and fail a lot. If they come from a large organization with a lot of structure and they want to have that structure and know exactly what they're going to do, tell me what I'm going to do and that's what I'm going to do, it might not be a fit, right? That first hire has to have that same kind of startup DNA that you have or founder DNA that you have. But you do want somebody that has and brings some skills to the table that can take things off of your plate, right? Free up some of your time in order to allow you to do what needs to happen in the business. So, you know what? Let's go back to being a master asker. Like, what if you ask them, How do you, you know, approach things you don't know how to do? What do they say? How do you deal with failure? Do you need to be managed and told what to do, you know, and have really clear direction? The answers to those questions will very quickly tell you whether they'll be able to be successful or not. I will tell you, just using me as an example, I am not a founder. Like, I admire all of you. I do not have that gene. I don't have it in my DNA. I don't like that kind of uncertainty. It's just not what motivates me. I like being in an organization. Um, doesn't have to be large. Um, but people ask me all the time, why don't I leave, you know, corporate America and start my own consulting business? I think I've been asked that for the last 15 years. Haven't done it yet because I admire you guys. Like, I, I'd rather help you be successful than go out there and try to do it on my own. But I would tell you that, um, I have worked for startups and I've seen that uncertainty. And I've had to wear multiple hats. I thrived in that environment. I just couldn't be the founder. So, you know, I'd say that it requires a very specific personality. So hopefully that, that helped.
Thanks.
We have— so I just want to say one. So I just want to say one thing. So somebody said, but another key indicator is their attitude or culture fit. So, so you don't want to have groupthink. Like, you don't want everybody to think the same way. Culture fit? Or is it skill fit? And they bring a little bit difference to the culture, right? A different point of view, a different insight, different experience, different life experience, you know, from a different region, from a different whatever it might be, right? You might have, you know, all men. Let's bring in a woman. You might have all you know, really to extend diversity amongst your leadership team. So I understand the cultural fit comment. But what you don't want to have is you're just hiring the same person over and over and over again in a different body. You do want a mix of ways of thinking and ways of doing things so that everybody, right, gets an opportunity to see a little bit of difference. So I understand the point behind cultural fit. But you don't want to just have a, you know, a hiring of, you everybody sort of thinks the same, everybody sort of looks the same, everybody approaches everything the same. That doesn't give you a whole lot of diversity of thought, right, which that's where really powerful innovation happens.
Yes, diversity is key. So last question, we have a little more time. This is a more general question. I think it's going to be interesting to hear your thoughts. Can you please tell us, One or two mistakes, failures that you remember the most in your sales career and you want us as new founders to avoid?
Yeah, so I always say that, listen, I grew up in sales. It's what I love to do. It's what I'm really best at. I haven't carried a quota in a very long time, but I advise, you know, some of the largest selling organizations in the world as well as startups. And I can tell you that I was probably not the best mentor and coach early in my sales management career. I was a high-performing individual contributor, and then I got promoted to management, which many of us do. And it doesn't mean just because you were a great salesperson, you'll be a great manager. Which, you know, initially, I was not great. I always say that I hope I'd be a better manager today than I was, you know, 20 years ago. That would be a hope of mine if I ever decided to get back into sales. So, I would say not investing enough time in my own managerial development because I was running so hard and fast to hit the sales numbers and hire and keep up with demand and just do my job that I wasn't sort of taking time and investing in my own development, which then meant, I wasn't developing those around me. So, that would probably be one. But right off of that, I was also burning out. I burnt out and I was burning out my teams. So, that goes back to that understanding how to manage better. So, I would say, you know, from a new founder, you know, hiring and scaling up a sales team is really trying to make sure that you hire the right people who can manage. And you're not just promoting your high performers. That you really put things in place to avoid that burnout, put tools to take time off their day-to-day of redundant and sort of menial tasks, allow them to focus on the value base that customers want. And from a founder perspective, just because you have a really great idea and the way you sell things because you're passionate about it and it's your company does not mean your sellers will have that level of understanding and connection to what you're trying to accomplish. So it's not that that's wrong. It's that they're never going to be able to duplicate that. That's where you really need to lean into the talent that they have and what kind of salesperson that you want. So I'd say those were probably the mistakes or failures I had is probably to be a better manager and mentor and coach and not just, not only just self-burnout, but just burn out those around me. That would, that would probably be what I would change.
Those are some amazing tips. Please show your love to Tiffany with the emojis down. We have the short key 1, 2, and 3, and 4. And this is the end of our Q&A session. I know there are more questions, but you can connect with Tiffany. We're gonna send you a replay. Of today's webinar, read her books. All the links, all the information will be there. And now we're gonna switch to the networking mode. And please follow our other events, our social media channels, Tiffany Bova's channels. And we're gonna see you at our next global webinar.
Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it. Bye-bye.
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