CXChronicles Podcast

CXChronicles Podcast 176 with Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, Podcast Host & Best-Selling Author

July 20, 2022 Adrian Brady-Cesana Season 5 Episode 176
CXChronicles Podcast
CXChronicles Podcast 176 with Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, Podcast Host & Best-Selling Author
Show Notes Transcript

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #176 we welcomed Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, Host of The Customer Experience Podcast, and Wall Street Journal best-selling Author of "Human-Centered Communication" & "Rehumanize Your Business".

Ethan has spent more than a decade helping people enjoy clearer communication, human connection, and higher conversion by replacing some of their faceless, digital communication with simple, personal video messages in emails, text messages, LinkedIn messages, Slack messages, and similar. He's sent more than 12,500 videos and co-authored two (and a half) books on the what, why, who, when, and how of this "relationships through video" movement.

BombBomb makes it easy to record, send, and track video messages, allowing you to be “in person” with those who matter most to your business at any given time.

More than 60 thousand business professionals in Mortgage, Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate use BombBomb Video to rehumanize their communication.

Ethan's also the host of one of my favorite podcasts, The Customer Experience Podcast where he interviews amazing customer focused business leaders from across the world.

In this episode, Ethan and Adrian chat through how he has tackled The Four CX Pillars: Team,  Tools, Process & Feedback throughout his career + shares some of the tips & tricks that have worked for him across his customer focused business leader journey.

**Episode #176 Highlight Reel:**

1. Leveraging video messaging to communicate with your customers & your team
2. Creating natural collisions with your customers & users to fuel growth
3. Meeting your customers and team on their preferred communication mediums
4. Doubling down on asynchronous messages + humanizing your outreach
5. Finding the balance between the human touch and the technology touch

Huge thanks to Ethan for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience and customer success space into the future.

Click here to learn more about Ethan Beute

Click here to learn more about BombBomb

Click here to learn more about The Customer Experience Podcast

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, please stop by your favorite podcast player and leave us a review today. This is the easiest way that we can find new listeners, guests and future business leaders to join our customer focused community!

And be sure to grab a copy of our book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon +  check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see all of our customer focused business leader video content + our past podcast episodes!

Reach out to CXC at INFO@cxchronicles.com for more information about how we can help your business make customer happiness a habit!

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#176 -- Ethan Beute, Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, Podcast Host & Best-Selling Author

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:00:08.50) - All right, guys. Thanks so much for joining another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. Super excited. We have an awesome guest today, guys, Ethan Butte, who is the chief evangelist at BombBomb plus he's an incredible author. Plus selfishly is one of my favorite podcasts who also does a ton of awesome work in the customer experience space. Even. Why don't you say hello to the CX nation? My friend. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:00:27.49) - Hello. I am happy to be here. I'm a member of CX nation, a well-informed listener to the other conversations and it's a privilege to participate. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:00:37.42) - We're we're pumped to have you, man. So, so guys, just to set the stage a little bit before you then jumps in, as I briefly mentioned, number one, um, similar to all of us, he's working with customers and he's working with his teammate every single solitary day, helping to build BombBomb over the last 10 plus years, but he also has these incredible conversations on probably a daily basis, right? Even with all these other awesome business leaders and all these different guys and gals that are doing incredible things across different businesses and different spaces. So I'm excited to get, get into that. And then lastly, um, Ethan has, has, has done some incredible work writing books and making some pretty incredible content. So I'm pumped to have you here today. Ethan, why don't you, um, why don't you start to show up? Like we start off all these episodes, take a couple minutes, man. Set the stage, give our listeners, uh, give our listeners a couple of minutes of how you got into the world that you're in. What were some of your stepping stones and how did you kinda how'd you kind of figure out how to, how to get on your own customer focused business leader journey. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:01:30.76) - Thank you for that opportunity. So I'm a marketer by background, you said kind of content creator. And I think that's at my core. That's really what brings me to life. I like this intersection of practitioner, learner, teacher. Um, and so in a chief evangelist role, I'm an individual contributor here at BombBomb and have been for three years now. Um, and it it's really feels like an ideal role for me personally. So I came up as a marketer inside local TV stations, uh, got bored of that, met the two co-founders of BombBomb. I was doing project work for them, uh, really even before go to market, which was around 2011. So I was doing project work with them in, uh, 2009, 2010, joined them full time, uh, in fall of 2011. And as you said, it's been over a decade now of building this bootstrapped business, primarily from a marketing seat. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:02:21.22) - I was the first and only marketer for a while. And, you know, the, the core executive team has been together for a lot of that time. So right now I'm thinking in my head of our chief revenue officer, who, when he joined the company a few months after me was the only guy answering the phone and responding to email tickets, you know, he's the support guy and literally built the entire CS function. And so, you know, I got to come up and build this business and figure it out, uh, with guys like that, you know, we didn't, we didn't bring in a lot of people who had done it eight times before, uh, or even three times before we've kind of the core group has figured it out along the way. And it's been an absolute privilege to, um, then, uh, author two books, uh, kind of around the themes that we're working around BombBomb is a video email, video messaging platform. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:03:07.22) - Um, and we pioneered the space within, through and for our customers and community over the years. And I've been privileged to a build personal relationships with hundreds and hundreds of our customers. We used to do a lot of trade shows and conferences. So I got to, you know, we'd swap video messages because our customers are sending videos. So we have this kind of human familiarity in this kind of psychological proximity, but then you meet people in person. And so just learning, meeting, telling their stories, um, in a variety of ways, from a marketing perspective, while having the purview of being on the senior leadership and executive leadership team along the way has been, um, just a joy. And so, uh, last piece, I feel kind of like a pretender in the CX space at some level, um, because I'm mostly a conduit, right? I'm asking questions on behalf of our team. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:03:58.43) - You know, they say, ask podcast questions that your audience wasn't allegiance to. I know my team members a lot better than I know listeners like you, I can see the thousands of streams and downloads that are happening, but so few people actually raise their hand, reach out, ask questions, provide feedback, even though I get my personal email address on every episode. Um, and, uh, and so I'm really asking questions on behalf of our team so that we can be better at doing this. And then of course it's really influenced, um, a lot of my teaching as well. So I feel like a conduit for the CX, uh, storylines, by talking with so many sales, marketing, customer success, customer experience leaders, such as yourself. I just had you on the customer experience podcast and intro to you as someone who's held CX titles longer than anyone. I know it, you know, well over a dozen years. And so, um, it's been fun to be part of this as CX becomes this emerging storyline and this emerging point of competition and differentiation in business in general, um, to have collected and shared a lot of those stories and do have built a number of relationships in the space. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:05:05.57) - I love it. I mean, even, you know, the, the first thing that I think you and I started.

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:05:09.73) - Talking about the first day that we met was just this idea of what you just kind of shared with our listeners, which is there's something really interesting about being, um, a customer focused business. They're the people, the guys and the gals that get to spend time or their primary function in their role at any business is getting one-on-one time with customers getting one-on-one time with users, but then bringing back some of the lessons, right? Some of is great. Some of it's not so great. Some of it's phenomenal opportunity. Some of it's like, dude, we can never build that. Come on. That's not realistic. But then being able to bring that goal back to the internal teams. So you mentioned sales, marketing, product analytics. I mean, it goes on right? All of us, every one of our listeners today, Ethan, right? They've got a bunch of awesome roles that their company, how you leverage, you use some of those roles and some of those executive leaders that might be a different story depending on your executive leadership team. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:05:58.03) - Um, but man, what an incredible position to have in a role where you get to spend that time on the CX side and the customer experience side, the customer design side, and just generally understanding what they like about your product, but then bringing it back to the employee side and bringing it back to the employee experience that I swear, man, I think that the longer that I've been doing some of this and the more conversations that I have with awesome people like you, I really truly believe man, that this is one of the most interesting spaces to be in any company. And I think post pandemic, and certainly as we move into this new, let's just minimally call it our hybrid world. Guys. I know that some folks are back in the office and some people are still sitting in their basketball shorts at home. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:06:37.72) - Let's call it what it is. But I think that like the ability to triangulate and to go back and forth on the customer and the employee side of the external and the internal side, he makes you a different type of expert. You said conduit. I think, man, I think so often even the work that folks like us do, it's gluing this stuff together. It's literally bringing it all together. It's, it's gluing the journey. It's gluing the team, it's gluing the customer base. And I think it's just, it's awesome. And it's awesome to hear all the different ways that people really can kind of get into the space. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:07:06.22) - Yeah. Quick story for you. So the way that I got my title, which is unique, chief evangelist was that I, uh, I did something I've done a handful of times, which is reach out to someone and invite myself to host them as a guest on their own podcast. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:07:20.06) - This one guy named singer Visory, who at the time was a co-founder and chief evangelist at, uh, uh, Terminus and account-based marketing platform. And they kind of helped pioneer the account based marketing space. And he said, I'll do you one better. That's a great idea because I said, what I want to do is talk to you about your title and your role. Like, I think it's interesting. And I think other people would think it's interesting too. And so he said, I'll do you one better find three more chief evangelists and I'll run it as a four-part series once a week for a month. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:07:48.26) - So I knew Dan Steinman from Gainsight. Uh, and so, uh, he actually helped me get the, my first book deal with Wiley. And so I reached out to him and he was an immediate, yes, I cold reached out to a guy. I found on LinkedIn named David's Betsky who's the first employee and voice at Amazon. So he's the chief evangelist of Alexa and echo dude responded right away and was in. And then I cold reached out to guy Kawasaki, arguably the world's first chief evangelist at apple. Um, and, and now chief evangelist at Canva. And that was a funny one. So I sent him a video email with BombBomb and I could tell that it was getting opened in the video is getting played and you haven't got opened like a couple dozen times. The video got played about eight or 10 times. So I knew something was happening. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:08:28.01) - I just found the email. It was likeGuy@guykawasaki.com or guy Kawasaki G well, I don't, one of his websites is random email address. So I could tell that I had hit something useful, but I didn't know what was happening in about two weeks after I sent that. Um, I got a reply back from someone in, in a publicity at penguin random house. Unfortunately for me, uh, he was doing publicity because he was releasing a memoir. Um, so I told Sandra and he was like, can I join that podcast with you and her podcast? You could interview guy Kawasaki with me, if you to. So point being, I rounded up what I learned from all four of those people. And one of the lessons in that list is outside in inside out. So this is an ill-defined role. There are no clear metrics lines of reporting. Very background's very of those people. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:09:14.12) - I just mentioned. One is a dev, an engineer. One of them came out of marketing. One of them, you know, Dan Steiman of course is a customer service customer success expert built that organization in the category that really helped define that space. Um, and so, but, but this inside out, outside in thing is an interesting dynamic that all four of them shared, um, and guy Kawasaki by the way, was from sales. And it's this idea, as you already said, like, there are things we think about the market or things we want to do, and we take them out into the market and we hope that it's received well and we seek feedback. Um, and then of course, you know, in the, in the CXCs space, we're constantly collecting feedback product of course has great access to product data. And so they're taking that feedback in, and it's just this constant inside, out, outside in really characterizes CX when it's done well. And it also characterizes the role that I'm in, but I like all the, like the four other people I interviewed and more of these people that I've spoken with were essentially free agents inside the organization. Right.

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:10:15.55) - You know, cuts both ways. It gives me in my personality type, the idea that I'm not my feet, aren't being held to the fire over some specific numbers, but I can really help influence those and kind of come in as a, either a hero or a guide on a, on a specific initiative or a specific project help get it going and then turn it over to other people. Or, you know, be brought in as a strategic consultant internally to, to look at something and ask good questions and collect some data and collect some customer stories and find ways to make these things better. And so this, I just want to emphasize that inside out, outside in thing is, is a really fun and valuable dynamic. And if no one has that as a responsibility, I think it's one worth looking at inside your own organization. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:11:01.06) - I love it. Ethan, in such an easy way to get started too, regardless of what your, what your business is, what your level is or experience levels are outside, out, inside in. It's easy way to just get started, right. Get started with, with getting that, that, that feedback to use, right? So that you can, you can overtime kind of iterate and optimize with how you get better at it. Ethan, I'd love to, I'd love to jump into the first C splitter team men, and you've already kind of hit on this, but spend a couple of minutes talking about, um, I'd love for you to kind of just give a, a higher level on, on the BombBomb team, but you guys work with a ton of different customers, right? So Bob, that's one of the other cool parts about your job, man. You get all of these other different types of, um, customers and users that are leveraging video messaging, leveraging the BombBomb tools, spend a few minutes talking about kind of how, what are these last 10 years mean? You must have, you must have picked up two or three major focus areas that you're constantly thinking about when it comes to that first six pillar of team. Do you spend a couple of minutes kind of talking about what you've really seen to be some of the, the easiest ways that any business leader or any team can really kind of make sure that they've got a strong foundation for that pillar? 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:12:03.55) - Sure. Yeah. So when, uh, just to, just for context, when I started, we were fewer than 10 people today. We're about 130 people. I had two years ago, two and a half years ago, pre pandemic. We were probably 90 to 94% Colorado Springs or Pikes peak region with another 6% up in Denver and then a small, tiny, like one, 2%. Far-flung like kind of all over the place. Now, of course, that we've hired about a quarter to a third of the company amid, or I hope I hope we're postpaid. I don't know where we are, but let's just, 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:12:36.64) - Uh, you know, you know, we're, we're hiring everywhere and most people kind of were chatting about this before. You're like, Hey, where are you? Um, I'm in the, I'm in the office, but there are only like a dozen of us that are in the office most days of the week. And so I guess a couple things I'll share one, um, is, is more a to be determined type situation. Um, and I'll just identify, we were a very, very strong in-person culture. We had what we called BombBomb Friday. And so we would cater lunch every Friday. The first half hour is just everyone kind of eating and hanging out. And it was like this really nice, big mixed thing. This was the place where to devs are sitting together across from a CSM, a customer care associate, a BDR and a product marketer, right? Like at the same table, all eating lunch, just hanging out. And, and, and, and so the value of that intermixing is just, it can't be overstated. It's impossible to overstate the value and benefit of that. And then the back half of that was like kind of programming. People are still eating a little bit, but it's now, you know, let's bring up the office manager to talk about two or three things going on and let's, uh, introduce this new person and play the new person game, which is a game we made up, you know, to kind of get people in 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:13:47.33) - What's the new person game. What's the newsperson person game. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:13:50.45) - The new person game had a number of iterations, but the first one was asking really kind of off the wall, challenging, interesting. Like, would you rather type questions to new people to get to know them 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:14:02.48) - In front of the whole company? Ethan can put them right into the fire right into the totally 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:14:07.91) - Totally. Well, and by the way, another kind of into the fire thing from a team perspective, one thing that every new employee does at BombBomb is Cindy video to the all company email address I'm answering two or three basic questions. And, um, that's another kind of challenging thing for some personality types to do, but it's just so wonderful, especially now, this is where I'm going. I'm going with, like, we're struggling with the transition from the strong in-person thing. So anyway, we'd also shut down at four o'clock on Fridays and just hang out, you know, all the standard stuff, you know, uh, drinks, alcoholic, non-alcoholic drinks, and, you know, the fun games and made up games and things like a social hour. And so if our CTO was trying to close like a really specialized developer, that's hard to get, and they have multiple offers. In most cases, he would just bring them to BombBomb Friday and it was a closed deal. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:14:59.57) - He said, I would win about 75% of those situations because when they felt the energy, they felt that connectedness, they saw how the whole company, not just these individual teams work together is a done deal. So it was a struggle for us as, as we split apart completely during the pandemic. And then now when we opened the office back up, most people prefer to be from home. And so we're still struggling to try to figure out the right way to create that rich interaction, that spontaneous unscheduled center, because the, the learnings that you get, the relationships that you get, the help that you get, the insights that you get is something that's really difficult to replicate digitally, virtually and online. And I know there's some proxies for that, but, um, it becomes challenging. And then of course the other thing related here is something that I'm sure you talk about all the time. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:15:47.51) - I dedicated episode 200 of the customer experience podcast to it, which is your customer experience will never be better than your employee experience. So we're constantly looking for ways, not just to improve that spontaneous unscheduled informal stuff that makes a, the work a lot more fun, but B makes the output better because you have more perspectives and things for multiple seats in the house. Um, and of course, each person is a conduit for their own exposure to the customer. And so, because we all interact with the customer at different points, the more different people you bring to the conversation, the more different customer perspectives you're bringing, even in an informal way. And so, um, we're, we're doing, we've done a lot of different things. We have made a lot of progress on that, obviously, because we're so deep into this, this more remote digital experience. But, um, it's something that for us, you know, the first 6, 7, 8 years of our growth and development that was really critical to our success and really help define our culture was because relationships are our number one core value. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:16:50.85) - I love it. There there's two immediate things that you make me think about your Ethan. The first one is this idea of collisions like these natural universal collisions, where you mentioned two devs bumped into the two CSMs. And all of a sudden you've got, you know, one hour, a one hour just completely off the off the hook type of meeting where you're talking about customer needs, internal product needs, external product needs, blockers to strike all this fun stuff. And then number one. So collisions, man, I think the whole world needs to figure out how to, how we get better with digital or remote or hybrid based collisions. Cause I even, this is every company and there's many executives that we've had on this show. There's still kind of, uh, you know, scraping back and try to claw back and try to find a way that they can do it really well in the hybrid sets. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:17:35.55) - And then everybody mentions what you did, where, where it's like pre pandemic. When we were in just this physical place where it was, most companies would have their one day a week typically Fridays where you can kind of shorten it and close the week off. Um, but th the second thing that you made me think about, it's really interesting, man. I don't hear enough people talking about this, but there has just been a massive change in which leadership variables are best suited for the future, because the reality is there's a tremendous amount of existing, and this might even be some of our listeners to look in the mirror here, guys, but like some people were built for a walking the floor or walking the pod, or they're the, they're literally the guys and the girls that get the damn coffee started in the morning. And then they're typically the people that leave at the very end of the night, when, when, you know, when the cleaning crew is coming in, that's different than this new hybrid asynchronous digital space where you gotta be able to interact with people in the physical and the digital. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:18:29.61) - Um, this is where the sets us up perfect for the second CX pillar of tools. But like, this is then where tools like BombBomb or other video messaging solutions, um, or different types of chat solutions or different types of, um, uh, you know, different types of mediums that are internal and external users. They wanna, they wanna, they want to work in. So I think it's, it's gonna be an interesting time. And I know a lot of people that, and you're absolutely right. A lot of people have found little tricks, little tips, little ways that they can kind of sort of scoot ahead over these last two and a half years. But I do think that, uh, every single one of our listeners need to kind of take some time to think about how you're positioning that for your business, for your customers, for your teams, because if you haven't already asked people, and if you already, haven't done a ton of work, trying to solicit some feedback, some ideas to listen, some suggestions for how that's going to work really well, do that tomorrow, do it today because it's like, it's one of these things where going back to that CX and D X blender, that balance, and we talked about at the front of the show, or that in episode 200 Ethan, that you just mentioned of your show, this is why you hear so many incredibly smart business leaders out there in the world talking about this stuff right now, it is a very different time. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:19:32.53) - And it's going to become a whole new space that every business leader is gonna need to invest in. Um, with that being said, Ethan, I'd love for you to jump into tools. Talk a little bit about, uh, the tool that you've built with BombBomb and the BombBomb team. And then I'd love for you to share maybe a couple of the tools that over these last 10 years, since you guys have been building your business, scaling the business, growing your customer portfolio, what are some of the tools and some of the technology to help get you guys, uh, up and up and, uh, out at the top of the mountain? Yeah. I'll start with this.

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:20:00) - With that question first. So kind of the guts of the operation, our Salesforce Marquetto and desk outreach. Um, those are some core ones, uh, with some odds on, on several of those things. Like it used to be called Bizible for, at marketing attribution, but now it's called something else. Uh, we were HubSpot prior to Marquetto and I feel like we maybe jumped that a little bit early. I feel like HubSpot is a little bit more approachable. You know, like three of us were in there all the time running that on the marketing side. And now we have, you know, more of an admin for Marquetto that's plugged into the rev ops team, uh, but still is a dedicated, uh, marketing ops person. So it's kind of like the guts of it all, a few tools that I really, really liked that we use at BombBomb in a variety of ways. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:20:41.76) - One is user testing. Um, we certainly use that on the product side. Um, we've used it in marketing before. So for example, we did an entire visual rebrand, but instead of just going with designer's choice, I think these look, these colors look better together, or, you know, uh, some internal committee picked, you know, this color palette versus that color palette. You know, we used user testing to build an audience of the types of people we were trying to attract and had conversations with them and showed them stuff. And they were on video and on audio and we could see and hear their actual response. It's this real human insight platform. Of course, we also use it on the product side, typically off wireframes and things. And so if you're looking to get real human insights on any of the, um, product services systems, processes that you're developing, that's a great platform for that. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:21:33.66) - Um, and I recently had the chief insights officer Jen LSDs on, uh, on our podcast because she put out a book on user testing, um, a podcast guest of ours that I didn't know what her platform was. Uh, but we ended up becoming customers, one called loop VOC. And the premise of what they're doing, uh, is, you know, you have these little loops that you're looking to close all the time. These are support tickets and here are the 18 people who asked about this bug or this problem. We want to close those little loops, but they also have this thing that, that helps turn those into bigger loops, um, so that you can identify the bigger things that you're missing, kind of on the support side, these bigger themes can emerge. And so, uh, we use that and we will usually bring that up in most of our weekly senior leadership team meetings to just kind of look at some of the highlights inside that platform. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:22:26.07) - Um, we used delighted, uh, primarily I think for NPS. And I can maybe talk about that later. It's more of a feedback conversation, just I'm sure you've had a lot of conversations about NPS good, bad, and ugly, um, all sorts of needs and, uh, in anticipation of this. And in related to a, um, the first look I got at it, um, I reached out to, uh, one of our CS leaders and about her excitement around Vitaliy, um, which is a CS, you know, it's CS design. And I remember hearing a recent conversation on, on CX Chronicles about 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:22:58.93) - How, you know, marketing never needs to argue or fight to get their marketing automation systems. Sales never needs to fight to get their sales force and their outreach. Um, but to have a dedicated, uh, CS platform is something that we've done somewhat recently. Um, and it's already yielding a lot of results. And so that's just a quick run through some of the tools that we use. Um, and thank you for mentioning BombBomb. Again, video email, video messaging, you can record and send these from a variety of places we're directly integrated in Salesforce, in Zendesk, in outreach, of course we have our own web app. We have mobile apps. We have a Chrome extension that activates the tool set inside the Gmail inbox. We work in out, uh, outlook, um, as well. And so, uh, and with the Chrome extension, for example, I'll record video messages and drop them into LinkedIn messages. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:23:49.12) - I'll re drop them into slack. I know that both of those are have experimented with their own native video thing, but like, for example, if you want to know if your video is being watched, how long it's being watched, if you want to record a video once and use it over and over and over again for particular, uh, circumstance, that's something that you're not going to be able to do with those native tools. And so, um, there are a variety of different ways to use it. And, and last one, just connect team to tools. You know, something that our president, one of our, we have two co-founders our CEO and our president and our president every week will do what he calls the Friday video and records it with BombBomb, drops it into a slack channel and sends it to the T uh, all company email address and, um, just kind of state of affairs. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:24:32.86) - Sometimes it's a three-minute video. Sometimes it's an 18 minute video. Sometimes he does it solo. Sometimes he brings out a guest or two, and he's doing things like deals, one updates, pats on the back, um, decisions that we're making as a leadership team, you know, so there, there are a lot of different ways to use a video message we could do. I could do four hours on use cases across the customer life cycle and in the employee life cycle, I've spent a decade dedicated to learning and teaching and practicing these things, but, um, BombBomb anywhere that you're sending faceless typed out.

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:25:06.06) - To help you connect and communicate with any of your stakeholders is an opportunity to be more clear, to be more personal, to be more human, to walk and talk sometimes with a screen recording. And so, um, if you haven't considered video email or video messaging, whether it's BombBomb or another platform, cause we have a lot more competitors now than when we pioneered the space, you know, uh, 10, 12 years ago. Um, uh, it's something you absolutely should look at. And if anyone listening is seeking guidance, certainly hit me up on LinkedIn. Um, I've got a number of resources and I've connected with a number of people to help them strategize. And I've even consulted with people that are using a competitive product because I want to see the space grow. Uh, cause if the space grows, this becomes normalized. A business outcomes are better. B business culture is better and see the more this, this category or this practice is normalized and it grows. We'll get more than our fair share. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:25:58.50) - I love it. There's a, there's a few thoughts, Ethan, that, that, that you just made me think about. Number one for our listeners, just like, think about this Ethan and I keep kind of going back on this internal and this external type of view. Right? But like internally think about never having to worry again about when 30% of your damn team can't make the team meeting that week because they're on holiday. Think about the times when you keep getting feedback as a manager, as a director, as a leader saying, Hey man, I might not understand what you're asking me to do right now. So, and remember everyone learns different clips, right? Ethan. So not everybody can sit in a 30 minute weekly huddle and walk out feeling excellent about exactly what the, what, what did it. Some people need to hear it several times just to understand and comprehend and break down and then maybe there's questions. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:26:40.68) - Um, and then the third part is this man. I just, I don't mean you were joking about this the other day, but like we live in this world now where there's just simply no reason why as a leader, as a manager, you're your team, your internal team or better yet, once you start thinking about the different silos within your larger organization, why they don't just have the ability of going and watching a two-minute video when Ethan explains the top five things that they just unpacked from last week's customer focus groups or the top three things that the dev team just came out of the last, um, you know, the last sprint, getting ready to, to, to solution for us. So now we can go back to our customers and actually talk about what product just built or just spent all their, all their time and their energy doing externally, you know, in Ethan, you had a bunch of ideas in this the other day when we were chatting, but externally mad to constantly think about, I know I was joking with you the other day, but I was like, Ethan, this is like how you do, you know, your QBR reviews, your key account review follow-ups you mentioned all these different variables, all of these different pivotal moments where you are making sure that people are engaged so you can get away from the anecdotal yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:27:42.48) - Executive team. I think that these 20% of the customers are engaged and enter the world of, Hey man, you know, 80% of our top 20 are watching all of our followup QBR key account reviews every single month, uh, 80% of them are minimally engaging and watching every one of our follow-up videos confirming that they've actually understood what we just talked about. So there's so many ways you can do this, but I guess the thing is this, just to simplify it, it's like, it makes me think like we've literally been taught since we were kids. Everybody learns differently. Every human, every smart human learns differently. Some people want to see it on the chalkboard, the whiteboard, some people need it written out. Some people need to hear it. I'm, I'm a, I'm an audio person, man. I stopped reading books years ago, but I can guarantee you that I probably consume more audio content than probably probably 80% of the humans out there between podcasts and audio books. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:28:31.21) - Just because it became an easier way for me to listen, to absorb comprehend and to be able to go act upon whatever information or knowledge I was absorbing. Right. But my point is, is like, this is the same stuff guys we're constantly talking about, which is like part of part of having that openness and part of having multiple options and part of meeting your audience where they want to be met, whether it's internal or external, that's, what's super cool about what you guys are building. And then to your last point, that's why this market space became massive, right? This is huge market space. Now you've got all sorts of different types of businesses, of all different sizes, understanding the benefits of video messaging and some of the different things that you can gain by having visibility into who's actually absorbing, listening and watching and really kind of consuming some of the, some of the content that you're putting in front of them. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:29:13.72) - Um, Ethan, I'd love to, I'd love to just spend a minute or two talking about process. You kind of hit on some of this, but I'd love just to kind of hear as you guys grew the team and as the business expanded and as the portfolio grew. Sure. Number one, you got a bunch of different types of customers. What was like the living playbook process? Like how did you guys continue to sort of build to the playbook or add the processes or add the plays or the FAQ's or how did you kind of, um, populate that knowledge base if you will, as you grew the business. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:29:39.37) - Yeah, really it's been, it's been really fun. Like what I always say about the reason I've been here for over a decade, cause that's a long time for anyone to be anywhere, but it's wrong. It's software. Like no one at SAS has been at their company for a decade for the most part. Um, and, and so, you know, I always say it's, it's been fun and interesting and challenging at anywhere. Those three things intersect fun and interesting and challenging. It's interesting. That's a good work situation. That's why I keep having that because this keeps changing and evolving. And so in the beginning, lights see like the.

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:30:08.68) - Four years or so really was this, um, we call it VSB now, very small business, like even short of SMB. And it was, you know, the individual person or an individual inside a larger company finding BombBomb, starting a free trial. So we had this really like the sales and marketing motion was really about generating free trials. Like when we were really hardcore into this regenerate more than 4,000 free trials a month. And then we had an inside sales team that at the time, I think peaked maybe around 22 reps or so 23. And they would just call and email the free trial people that were, you know, round Robin to them, or that sometimes we got vertically oriented so that these three people were specializing in insurance. And these people were specializing in mortgage because they just knew it well. Or they maybe came to us with a background in it. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:30:55.57) - So there's a little bit of nuance there, but it really was this, you know, um, produce a lot of opportunities and have salespeople engage them directly, get them flipped on, go to a bunch of trade shows, not to generate leads, but to actually close sales on the floor. And we were really, really good at that. But then what obviously emerged was, well, I have a team of five people or 50 people or 500 people talk to me about that. And so when there was this kind of transition phase where our primary go to market motion was still oriented in our roots, but we were developing the product and we were developing on the CS side, actual like legitimate customer success, you know, in, in the early phase customer success beyond support was really about, um, creating an at-risk profile and having two or three people that were just outbounding to the at-risk people, you know, X number of, uh, you know, months before their annual renewal and engaging them and doing like straight up 15 to 30 minute one-on-ones diagnosis, teach them a couple of use cases, help them overcome their fear of video and send them off on their way. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:32:04.06) - And of course, what you learn there is that isn't necessarily as profitable a business, as you should be building humans, closing five, $600 deals or up to $1,200 deals. And then humans kind of solving all that stuff, you know, to save 500 more dollars for the hope of turning it into like 2,500 over the next five years. But we evolved the team, we evolved the sales and marketing. We evolved the CS org to now serve, you know, we've got not entire fortune 100 companies, but you know, a managed services division inside a fortune 100 company, for example. And so that requires a whole different sentence. So you have multiple playbooks and we've gone through multiple iterations, how to organize particularly the CS org who gets access to what resources became a thing, right? Like if you, if you're on our cheapest subscription at like 29 bucks a month, we cannot afford to take two phone calls from your LLC. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:32:58.84) - You're not profitable that month, right? You can't have thousands of unprofitable customers choking up the phone lines for these other accounts. And so figuring out all that stuff and finding the right tools to, to bind the balance between the tech touch and the human touch, um, has been a thing. And so the playbooks are constantly involved, evolving. I would say our primary emotion now across the three customer teams or revenue teams are we prefer to describe them marketing sales, customer success, and really you can't have that conversation without product and product managers, um, really is more of this team orientation. And now we're backing back into the kind of the self service piece to make sure that that's stable. So the journey maps are completely different ad sets in the, in the, in the, you know, the pipeline is completely different. And so we really are at a simplified look, we have the managed side of the business and the self-service side of the business. And within each there's a lot of nuance in within each there's the opportunity specifically from self-service to move a lot of those into this kind of managed side of the business, because this person is the pioneer in their organization that could turn into a 75 seat or 7,500 seat account. So, um, it's complex, it's really complex. So anyone going up market, which a lot of companies end up doing just like us, um, there's no right way to do it. And there's no playbook for all the playbooks you need. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:34:28.01) - Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand that. I think it's funny, man. So first of all, thank you for sharing that number. Number two, I think this is the hard part, right? And I think this is the big thing you can, as so many of our listeners probably are thinking about and really kind of stewing over every single day with their team or their customer set, which is like, that's this whole notion of how do you build living playbooks? Because you just now the man, like every business, every team, every customer base, it's constantly changing, especially if you're doing our type of work really well guys, right. Especially if you're putting your ear on the ground, you're listening to what these different policies or these different beats suggest you're creating opportunities from those pulses and beats you're socializing internally. And then you're coming up with solutions. That's the best part. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:35:08.51) - That's honestly, that's the most fun, uh, type of team business. And just, just, just, just world to be in is where like you're actually able to create that loop of change and positive impact. And, and then on top of it, man, let's call it what it is. It appeases, what's the CX side and the UX side that, that, that, that same notion, again, it's like, you're actually listening. You're actually producing incredible solutions. And then you're reminding and telling people and socializing with people, what you just did. And then you're starting that process all over again. That's like a super engaged, healthy place that I think everybody that's listening right now wants to be in. Um, but I, but you're right. It's like, it's up to us to think about how to create our versions of that living piece. Right. I, I, to borrow, um, to borrow some of the six Sigma ideas from our friends in the six Sigma space, but like that idea of how do you control and monitor? 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:35:56.69) - How do you control a monitor? It could be a monthly review. It could be a quarterly review, maybe minimally. And I, it's funny cause we, we both know that there's a lot of companies out there both very small businesses, SMBs, and I would argue even enterprise and beyond who don't do a good job at all with having a minimally, a quarterly look at ethic, user knowledge base, even though theoretically that's upstream, operational smoothing, where if you could effectively reduce 20% of your inbounds, because you just need to sharpen some notes or sharpen some directions. Now that you just mentioned the self service part here, Ethan, there's so many companies and so many customers out there that they do. They're smart. They want to go self-serve they don't need people like us. Like, unless it's really, really bad, or it's a high severity item or it's something that you just hit, you hit a wall and you can't figure out a solution. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:36:39.87) - Most people want to go find the answer and just go do it themselves. And so I think it's a ton of awesome ideas there. Um, Ethan, let's dive into the fourth and final seek pillar of feedback and I'm pumped for this. Cause again, I told you that a day. Um, I had so many, I, I told you guys the other day, I have so many ideas around some of the different things that we really should be doing with video messaging feedback came up. And I know you got a ton of ideas in this spend a few minutes kind of talking about how the BombBomb team and how you have really kind of gotten, uh, gotten really good at digging into customer feedback. I'd love to get some ideas for how you guys have leveraged some of these same ideas to, to, to, to get good at leveraging our employee feedback. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:37:16.29) - Yeah. I'll give you one philosophical idea or, or thing that's really important to me and has been really valuable for me. I'll give you something that our team does and then I'll give you something that I do personally, all related to feedback. So the philosophy is, you know, we all have all of this data coming in, product usage, data, feedback, satisfaction, and PS, et cetera. Obviously it's important to harness those things and create compelling stories and make sure that that are supported by the data and share them. So it's an ongoing conversation. Let's just set that aside for a minute and say that you've, you've probably had that conversation a number of times, and there's a lot of nuance there. Um, the, the big piece I want to add to that is that so often we lose sight of, or we don't have the patience or don't make the time for the literal voice of the customer. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:38:04.74) - And by that, I mean, the words that they're using, the context they're using them in direct conversations, recorded videos, like the elements that really color in the picture in great detail and with the right shading and the right specifics, that, that type of thing that can create empathy inside your organization. So anyone that's doing direct customer communication, the more you can share that with the rest of your team and the more you can harness and distribute and share and talk about the literal voice of the customer, not X percent of people do this, you know, Y number of times, every Z period of time, right? That's all good, but like the literal voice of the customer, how do they feel? How do they think, how do they express it? You know, and all of that. So just an emphasis on the literal voice of the customers. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:38:53.13) - One thing I want to raise something that we do as a company, um, every Tuesday we do a longer, uh, senior leadership team meeting. And we do just quick standups the other days of the week. And one round in that is always employee feedback and customer feedback. What are we hearing it? So that's when we bring up something like the loop VOC dashboard, that's where we hear about, you know, some of the positive feedback. That's where we share the literal voice of the customer. And so we make space for this in our senior leadership team meetings every week for what are we hearing from employees? What are we hearing from customers? And then oftentimes that'll wind up with parking lot conversations that in the back half of that longer meeting, where we spend 15 to 45 minutes really getting into a topic, that's where some of those topics come up. So that's one thing that we do every week. And then the thing that I do personally, that is kind of fun. It's a video use case. Um, I hope a lot of people listening might think about this. So one of the things we do is we take our NPS delighted feedback and every comment winds up in a slack channel. So the slack channel is just a feed of NPS scores with the comments. So if, if someone gives a score.

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:40:00.03) - Um, and it doesn't show up in the feed because there's no reason to look at all the individual scores. It doesn't make sense. But what I do is every day, I carve out time to scroll that channel, see all the ones that have come in since I last looked at it. And I'll often grab that person and look them up in our admin database, which gets, gives me a quick snapshot view of who they are, where are they? What business are they in? How many videos have they sent you? Just some high level surface stuff. And I will often send personal videos to those people. Now our CS team is doing that as well. Okay. They're looking to close the, the little loop with each of those people on each of those pieces of feedback. But I also do that myself as an executive, a to pro to produce conversation, but B mostly to validate people. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:40:44.19) - Thank you for that positive feedback. I can see that you've said eight sent 1800 videos for the last three years. It's a privilege as you know, in your business to be of service and value in it. Just so thankful that we can be that for you. That's just like noticing, right. I see you. I hear you. I appreciate you. But, and then of course, some of it's critical, um, and I'll say, Hey you, I guarantee you're going to hear in the next 48 hours from someone on our support team about the nature of what you're saying here, but what I wanted to provide you myself is just, you know, and just talk to these people. And it, you know, it takes as little as five minutes a day to read them all, pick one or two people to reach out to, and I'll do that several days a week. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:41:19.62) - And what it does is it, I feel like it's my own little piece to AA. Stay in touch with the customer, be produce actually some healthy conversation and some unique insights going beyond, like they're opening up a conversation there at some level they're asking for more from us, whether it's positive or critical. Um, and so I feel like if I can make that a habit, that's kinda like the legacy stuff, and I've been doing it for years, you know, can I reach all 70,000 of our customers know, am I going to try? No, but I think if I can make this a habit that I don't know what the tangible measurable benefit of that is, but I just feel like those are the little touches that are worth talking about on their side. Um, and I've seen it, some of them come up in social and that type of thing, but it's just a way to stay in touch. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:42:12.81) - And it's a way to let people know that they matter. Even if they're saying you get a too, I hate you. You told me this. And we, I quit, you know, um, I'm, I'm not renewing my annual subscription. I'm not renewing my monthly subscription or I can't believe my boss bought this for our team. My account's gonna stay open because you know, you know, my boss bought 14 of these things and mine is one of them, you know, no matter what the nature of it is. I mean, all anyone wants at the end of the day is to feel seen, heard, understood, appreciated at some level. And I think the small actions, I just have this, this faith or this intuition, and it could be foolish that these little acts add up in the end. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:42:52.69) - I think that they absolutely add up in the end. And I think the other thought that you, you just gave all of us here, which is like, you know, you have customers taking time out of their days to leave you a promoting remark. You minimally say, thank you for that. Whether it's automated or whether one of your humans is touching it. Um, you have an, you have a neutral that comes in. I've always viewed neutrals as your first yellow flag. You might not be a red flag, but it's, it's yellow card for sure. All the, all the, I mean, somebody is saying it wasn't perfect. So there's an opportunity for improvement, especially if the add color and there's commentary in there, somebody better be assessing what that, what that sentiment yields. And then the last one, man, this is the crazy one. I mean, we were just talking about this last night, but like the, the detractors, it's amazing how many companies that are technically crushing it. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:43:37.96) - And they're, they're doing 10, they're doing 25, they're doing 50, they're doing a hundred million dollars in sales and nobody answers the detractor. It blows me. We see, I see it. Every single solitary we could see Etsy. And then I think the other thing too is, um, it's amazing how many even really excellent sound executives don't necessarily add that extra color, which is, oh, no, no, no detractors and passives. There's an entire process in our organization for not only its support following up, maybe there's an escalation. Maybe there's a senior manager, there's a director. There's someone else getting involved.

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:44:10.87) - If you're not taking a, taking an opportunity to immediately calculate LTV or look at what your potential retention threats might look like when you get it attracted. That's crazy. Cause that takes 30 seconds to pull that math. And then the last thing is just, I've worked at some companies that are excellent and immediately understanding what that potential value could be in loss. So then the remediation, if you will, or the next step or whatever, you're going to kind of come back and try to try to make sure that that person feels excellent about leaving that shitty situation with, um, they've already got a robust process. They already know exactly what permissions the team can. Go ahead and go ahead. And maybe it's that extra next one's on us or maybe it's, um, a percentage discount for the, for the, for the foul play, whatever it looks like. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:44:52.48) - But guys, you have to be thinking about what this looks like, but what I'm thinking about with Ethan here and, and all the talks we've done with BombBomb, it's like, it's amazing how many companies, I haven't seen leveraging video messaging to do this because technically like, think about it. Some of our listeners, you guys have a thousand pieces of feedback a month coming in, and maybe some of you have 10,000 pieces of feedback or in a month. How interesting would it be to be able to just simply pull some of these different cuts out of the list, create messaging and create, um, to Ethan's point that he keeps saying a personal touch, a face-to-face type of look on what that looks like. I think it's an incredible, um, way that all of our listeners can kind of think about some of the different options that they got in front of them moving forward. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:45:30.88) - And then lastly, I just think even on the, on the UX that we already kind of hit on it, but like you can do a lot of this is mirroring to whether it's your, whether you're thinking of your customer side or whether you're just thinking about how you can become a better team leader, right. And keep people that are more engaged, happier, and lift showing up every day. So Ethan, this has been absolutely fantastic. Before we wrap up today's episode, my friend, please spend a minute or two. I want you to call it. Where can people find out more about you, sir? Where can they find your books? And then definitely please spend a minute talking about your podcasts. I don't want to make sure that everybody leaves here, um, understanding some of the content and some of the incredible stories that you're, that you're telling and that you're sharing with our community. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:46:03.73) - Cool. My name is Ethan Butte. Last name is spelled B E U T E. So you can find me on every social network, a Twitter and LinkedIn are great places to start and I'm there by first name, last name BombBomb is just the word bomb twice, B O M B B O M B a on all social and also bombbomb.com. The books are at bombbomb.com/book singular. Cause I made that page where there was only one book that doesn't her there now. And, uh, bombbomb.com/podcast is kind of the home base for the customer experience podcast. And, uh, you know, my whole goal there, I, I, I put in the subtitle of the first book that, that, that we wrote, rehumanize your business, how personal videos, accelerate sales, and improve customer experience. I knew it wasn't just a sales book because this is full customer life cycle, full employee life cycle. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:46:56.56) - So I felt like service was too narrow. Customer success was a little bit too SAS for the audience that this is appropriate for us, basically appropriate for anyone who works digitally, which is all of us. Um, so I chose customer experience. And so when it came time to launch a podcast, I want to do explore that. So I'm hosting typically marketing sales and customer success leaders in an ongoing conversation about how to align, how to work together in order to create a more consistent and better experience for customers, because it is the point of competition and differentiation. It has been for some time now, even though we haven't been talking about it that much in a future, it's only going to become more so for a variety of market dynamics that are only growing in strength and, and prevalence, uh, they're not diminishing including customer control, hyper-competition product parody, and we could go on. So CX is where it's at. Again, I am not as steeped in this as you are Adrian, but it's been really fun to serve as a proxy and to bring these people together in an ongoing conversation. And so, um, it's been a joy and you can search the customer experience podcast in your podcast app or go to again, bombbomb.com/podcast. 

Speaker 1 (tc: 01:48:08.72) - I love it will eat them. It's been an absolute pleasure having on a show and I am certainly excited to continue our conversation in the future. My breath. 

Speaker 2 (tc: 01:48:15.20) - Thank you. 

Speaker 3 (tc: 01:48:17.58) - Uh,