Mark Dinolo (SalesGlobe Sage) presents a Freative Friday episode that focuses on the first layer of a revenue roadmap: Insight. He outlines four disciplines within Insight (voice of the customer, macro market environment, competitor performance, and business performance) and delves into Voice of the Customer (VOC), explaining key diagnostic questions (unprompted feedback; importance vs performance ratings for your company and competitors) and recommended actions (regular feedback loops, NPS, one-on-one interviews, and AI-assisted analysis guided by clear prompts).
Chapters
Sam. Foreign, Welcome to Freedom Friday. Mark Dinolo here, art school MBA and CEO of Sales Globe. And it's that day, the week we get to take a fresh look at creative problem solving for your business and for your life. And last episode, we were talking about the revenue roadmap, and we were talking about the different layers of the revenue roadmap that help us to drive growth for the business. Layers of insight, sales strategy, customer coverage, and enablement. And in this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into that first layer, which is insight. And I'm going to talk about the four different disciplines within Insight, which are voice of the customer, the macro market environment, competitor performance, and business performance. And the really important thing about insight is we have to know what, where we are and what's happening in order to inform those other layers of the revenue revenue roadmap. So to inform our sales strategy, to inform our coverage model, to inform our enablement. So insight is that critical front end piece. So we'll look at those four major disciplines and as we look at these disciplines, I want to help us with how we think through them and generate ideas. So I want to look at two areas in each discipline. The first one is what questions we can ask about that discipline, because one of the first steps in better problem solving is asking better questions. And the second area is actions you can take to lead in that discipline, because moving the organization and making change is usually the key to getting results. So in the insight layer, let's start with that first piece, that first discipline, which is voice of the customer. And so voice of the customer, I call it voc. It's the guiding light for the business. And in the end, it's why we do what we do as a business, to address customer needs. Now, some people say, well, I do what I do to make money, but it's the customer needs that are really driving what we're doing as a business. And everything else follows that. So whether we make money or not depends on how well we do with our customers. So it's about understanding what our customers are truly saying, what they're feeling, what they're expecting, and, and without this, we could be navigating in the dark. So a misalignment with customer needs can derail even the best strategies or the best offers. So a few questions we want to ask around voice of the customer, what is it that we offer to our customers? So we're going to get into this in value proposition in the sales strategy layer later, but knowing what value we want to Provide is a good start to knowing what we want to ask about. Voice of the customer. So we just don't want to ask random things. We have to know what we're asking about and that's really around what we want to do for our customers. So what are our customers really saying about us? That's one of the first things you want to ask unprompted. So we want to get some unfiltered feedback through different means. Could be surveys, could be social media, could be customer reviews. But are there recurring themes or points of dissatisfaction that we must address? And when I say these are unprompted, we're not asking the specific questions. What we're doing is we're just trying to get a sense of the general feedback in the market. So an example might be a company discovering through customer feedback that their software is tough to navigate it and it might prompt an overhaul of user experience. The next question we want to ask is how do customers perceive our value? Now this is more directed, it's prompted and I think of this as customer comparing importance and performance. And there are really three steps to this. First, we want to understand what customers see as important, regardless of the provider. So what factors are important to them? So often we think about things like pricing or total cost or customer service or user experience, things like that. So it depends on what your offer is, but it's relative to what your organization or competitors do. And, and you want to have your customers rate this on a scale from 1 low importance to 10 high importance. For example, if you provide packaging, it may not just be about packaging, it could be more broadly about logistics or other things that surround what offer you provide. So you don't want to be too myopic about just looking at the one thing you provide because it may be related to other things that are connected to that. The second piece of that is, is you then want to understand your company's performance in each of those importance areas. So you want to rate that performance again from low 1 to high 10. So how does the customer rate your performance from 1 to 10? Then the third piece, understand your closest competitor or alternatives performance on the same scale. So what I mean by that is, well, on those things that are important, how does your closest competitor do what? Or the next best alternative? Even if it's not a competitor, maybe they do it themselves. Finally, you want to ask what are your biggest performance gaps in the highest importance areas? And also you want to see where the closest competitors gaps are. So by looking at those gaps, we can then Develop a plan to address the gaps and communicate back to your most important, largest customers directly and to the rest of your customer base more more broadly. And so the gaps you want to find are the ones the highest importance and lowest performance. Those are going to give us the biggest bang for the buck. Now with Voice of the Customer, let's look at actions to lead. You want to with the questions you've asked. Come to some actions, like setting up regular feedback loops through customer surveys, through focus groups, and one of my favorites, one on one conversations with the decision makers at the customer and regular feedback sessions can give you continuous insight into customer satisfaction. But you want to ensure your feedback methods are consistent, they're regular, and you're getting diverse perspectives, not just happy customers. Right? You want to get a broad range of customers. Another thing you might do is implement an nps, a net promoter score system to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. And it can be a quick gauge of overall customer sentiment. So you can do that at the time of purchase. You don't have to do it at regular intervals. For example, a financial services firm we work with uses NPS surveys after each client interaction and they monitor satisfaction and they make immediate adjustments. So you might have your insight on a regular basis. And you might also have NPS insight at the point of sale or at the point of decision. And then also you can use AI tools as you get a lot of information, you're going to want to analyze the customer feedback and identify trends. So you can leverage text information, you can leverage analytical information to uncover patterns and feedback. And one point on the AI is that the AI output is only going to be as good as the things that we're talking about a minute ago, which is the prompts or the questions that you ask. So before you have AI analyzing all the data, make sure you know what it is you want to learn about that information. Until then, use these ideas and you're free to Friday and every day.
