Driving Growth Through High Velocity Market Research | Gary Pansino

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #246 we were live at the Thompson Hotel in downtown Austin, TX at XDay 2024 with Gary Pansino, Founder at Velodu based 

Gary is an Alumni of Intuit, P&G, Clorox, BMS. He now runs a Qual and Quant research factory with his sister. Questions from mostly repeat clients arrive on trucks. And they do their thing and ship answers back to them, with a smile.

In this episode, Gary and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team at Velodu thinks through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #246 Highlight Reel:**

1. Building expertise in surveys & customer research at massive companies
2. Increasing the speed of growth by customer listening & focus groups
3. Leveraging customer information to drive product & service innovation
4. Customer team building & collecting constant employee feedback
5. Investing in competitive research & understanding your primary threats
 
Click here to learn more about Gary Pansino

Click here to learn more about Velodu

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

If you enjoy The CXChronicles Podcast, stop by your favorite podcast player hit the follow button and leave us a review today.

For our Spotify friends, make sure you are following CXC & please leave a 5 star review so we can find new listeners & members of our community.

For our Apple friends, same deal -- follow CXCP and leave us a review letting folks know why you love our customer focused content.

You know what would be even better?

Go tell one of your friends or teammates about CXC's content,  our strategic partners (Hubspot, Intercom, Zendesk, Forethought AI, Freshworks, TimeToReply & Ascendr) + they can learn more about our CX/CS/RevOps services & please invite them to join the CX Nation!

Are you looking to learn more about the world of Customer Experience, Customer Success & Revenue Operations?

Click here to grab a copy of my book "The Four CX Pillars To Grow Your Business Now" available on Amazon or the CXC website.

For you non-readers, go check out the CXChronicles Youtube channel to see our customer & employee focused business content. 

Transcript

The CXChronicles Podcast #246 with Gary Pansino, Founder at Velodu - Full.mp4

Speaker 1 (00:00:05) - All right, Gary, thank you so much for joining us on the Seeds Chronicles podcast. Number one, how is X Day 2024 going for you so far? It's going wonderful. I'm learning. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:16) - And at my stage in my career, learning and helping young people is probably equal emphasis for me. So I was able to give some good tips and kind of get some people that were where I was 20 years ago or 15 years ago, maybe a show them some empathy and tell them they're not crazy for going through the things that they're going through that are timeless. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:41) - Because people don't know that, right? And so you get to certain places in your career, in your life. You think like everyone's got their stuff figured out. They don't realize every one of us, they could totally make it. Number one. And then number two, like the older you get, the streets are the older and wiser and more mature because it takes coming to a bunch of these types of things or meeting a bunch of types of people. But before we even get into that, take a couple of minutes, introduce yourselves to the CX station, my friend. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:03) - Okay. My name, do I look that way? 

Speaker 1 (00:01:07) - You can look at this guy. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:08) - You can look at Gary. I'm just going to look at you because it's weird. But my name is Gary Pansino. I've spent 20 years of my 30 year career on the supplier side. So being a research vendor consultant, always as an entrepreneur, kind of my own kind of type companies. But 10 years on the client side at Intuit and Procter and Gamble and Clorox and a short stint at Bristol Myers Squibb where I actually worked on nutritional products for menopausal women, which was awesome from a career development standpoint. So yeah, so that I currently do consulting. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:48) - We're very much general contractors. Our clients know us. They hire us as people. It's very relationship driven. Everything is word of mouth. Everything is referral. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:59) - And what's your company's name, Gary? 

Speaker 2 (00:02:00) - Velodue. V-E-L-O-D-U. It means doing things fast. We wanted to keep an umbrella because that's the one thing that has been absolutely a constant throughout market research is that speed is critical. So we try to never cut corners, but not be the bottleneck. I found when I was hiring agencies, one of the things that I used to determine whether I would hire them again was whether they made it easier to get to the finish line or harder. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:37) - And so many business to business style partners I've noticed, and the bigger the agency, usually the more difficult and slower things go because their own internal mindset and organization and systems and staffing think it actually adds complexity when you're hiring somebody to actually reduce the complexity and give you answers. So yeah, we love what we do. I would be very happy to do this for the rest of my living life. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:08) - That's fantastic, brother. Number one, I'm pumped that you were able to join us. I'm pumped that you were able to join all of us here today, next day. But I got to ask before we even dig into some of the stuff downstream, what drew you to this type of work? What made you, early on in your career, what made you think, man, I want to help companies understand the good, the bad, the ugly, what do customers love about them, what do customers hate? 

Speaker 1 (00:03:31) - This notion of research and understanding just market trends, market sentiment, what drew you to this space, brother? 

Speaker 2 (00:03:39) - This is another story that's as old as dirt, old as time, is it was my first job. I went to Georgia Tech and have a degree in chemical engineering, which means I should be probably sweating as an engineer in an oil refinery somewhere, or making carpet chemicals, or working in a food factory. Some of these experiences, actually all three of those experiences I had as internships and jobs and things like that. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:06) - But Procter & Gamble hires people from Georgia Tech, my alma mater, to do, at the time, product research, which was a blend of product development, think food formulation, and soap formulation, and chemistry, and mass balances, and all of that technical stuff. But they wanted to have market research embedded in the product teams, because at the time, and I'm pretty sure P&G still has this culture, their culture was always to have a superior product, a tested superior product. 

Speaker 2 (00:04:41) - So there's a guy, Will Papa, he was the recruiter, and he did the screening interview for me, and he was my first boss. So he saw something in me that I had a good head for business. So I started at Procter & Gamble working on Folgers and Millstone Coffee, doing surveys, and focus groups, and consumer comments, data mining, and all the normal things back then. And I am forever grateful that that was my first job.

Speaker 2 (00:05:15) - Fell into place- obviously ups and downs and stuff, but I got the best MBA from going to Procter & Gamble at that moment in time, the mid-90s- awesome, older coworkers, awesome culture, awesome training and it was all on the job learning. I've never taken a marketing class and I deal with MBA marketers from the best business schools every day and I swear the things that I learned from day one at Procter & Gamble. It's what I needed to know. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:44) - That's amazing. Some of the things you mentioned that you've spent years and years and years thinking about. So just market research, focus groups, survey, product analysis, service analysis- is there one of those things that's your favorite thing to do? Is there an activity in all of that market research, all the activities that boil underneath market research- is there one of those things that you like to do the most? 

Speaker 2 (00:06:08) - Oh, oh- and it very much speaks to what Stan with the really long name, the guy, the VP from Unilever, the older gentleman who is most excited about his granddaughters, which is very touching, and everything he said was just pure wisdom, pure grandpa wisdom. But connecting the dots and telling the story- and, unfortunately, as market researchers, it's a very labor-intensive thing that we do from cradle to grave. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:34) - Even just the collation and interviewing of stakeholders to get the questions organized is a data analysis connecting the dot exercise, and then it just gets complex from there. But it is the thing that I think is the most important thing, and over the years, various buzzwords come up into your vocabulary and it's all about the so what? 

Speaker 1 (00:06:58) - So what are we gonna do? 

Speaker 2 (00:07:00) - What are we gonna change? How are we gonna? 

Speaker 1 (00:07:02) - What are we actually gonna do? 

Speaker 2 (00:07:04) - And that is honestly, again something as old as time. That's where that's always been the opportunity. Space for market research is the translation from information to activation. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:17) - Big time, big time. Yeah, because it's funny, gary- we'll have all these incredible folks come on the show talking about how they've thought about not just customer experience, but customer experience, employee experience, product experience, research experience, all the things, all the different things that really boil into how the hell do you learn something about your users, your customers, your market, your products, your services, all the things under the umbrella. 

Speaker 1 (00:07:39) - And what I constantly hear so many of these incredible customer-focused business leaders talk about is: Adrian, what's the point of collecting some of this information? Or to your so what point? What's the point of collecting this stuff if you're not gonna do anything with it, or if you're not gonna put it into action, if you're not gonna put it to work, if you're not gonna knight somebody or some division on the team to have the authority and autonomy and the responsibility to go get shit done, to make something, make change of it. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:05) - And I tell you, man, it's crazy because at CXC we work with all these different emerging businesses and they'll come to us and say you know, we need help with setting up our first sets of MPS or customer satisfaction or customer effort score on your products, and I'll literally get into the so what early. And I'm like we can do every one of those things. We have friends at Question Pro. We've got friends, all sorts of strategic partners can do this for you. But what are you gonna do with it? Or how are you gonna close the loop? Or you're a small team. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:31) - Who on your now small team, is gonna literally follow up with people? And if they take the time out of their day to do a survey or participate in a focus group, and the answers are often baffling, Gary, and people don't sometimes, they don't even. They don't even think about it. They don't think about what this really looks like, especially if you're at a mature state, like where you've been doing this for years now, man, where you've done it and you've done it for some of the global leading companies. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:54) - But even really smart people that can get a business off the ground or come up with an idea out of thin air and bring it all the way to market, they don't necessarily think about that. It's one of those things where, like sometimes you need some help, kind of understanding: what are you gonna do or the so what moment, and like what are we doing this for? If you're not gonna put it into action or put it back to work? 

Speaker 1 (00:09:10) - Well, I gotta ask you over all of your years, when it comes to like what's been like- and I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit- but like either some of the best experiences that you've ever seen that a company has taken in the so what moment and actually gone and done something about it. I'd love to hear, like maybe one story or one just thought that comes to mind- around a company that fucking knocked it out of the park and, being able to, they got a piece of feedback. They heard what the customer, they heard what the user was saying. 

Speaker 1 (00:09:38) - You've gotta have some story where you're just like you were even blown away by kind of how they wanted to go ahead and put out something like that. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:45) - My reaction is almost a non-reaction because I don't think. I think things are getting worse, not better. So I actually I struggle to even. Here's why, as market researchers, we don't execute the so what? So some marketer or some engineer or some salesperson or some customer support staff member has to do it, yep, yep. And the best success that I've seen is market research changing the language and imprinting an idea. 

Speaker 1 (00:10:28) - Okay, okay. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:30) - I will give a tangible example: small businesses are the ultimate utilitarians, okay, yep, that is a line at one of the companies that I dealt with that caught fire. Okay, just that sentence. Yep, they're the ultimate utilitarians, yep. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:46) - And behind that are the insights about, you know, small businesses don't have slush funds for R&D. They don't have money sitting around, usually, to deploy and build staffs with. They can't suffer years of losses the way big companies. So many of the companies that I deal with nowadays, they all have those things. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:10) - The employees have access to those resources, so it's very hard for them to understand their customer, their small business audience, at a fundamental level or even a basic level because they have resources and options and capital that their audience does not have. When that idea caught fire, it bridged that gap to where now people are like, oh, small businesses are utilitarians, you know, maybe they might not want to spend that on that. 

Speaker 2 (00:11:52) - So I think our best hope is to leave them with something they will remember as a one-liner or as an image or as a customer quote or as an in-home visit footage thing that just blows their mind. It's one of the things that actually I loved what QuestionPro did as far as engaging with the live poll to start the event. Because it immediately made me triangulate my knowledge or kind of benchmark my knowledge and what I might know already and where I'm right and where I'm wrong. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:31) - And that's one of the things that I intentionally grabbed my business partner during one of the breaks. I was like, I just want to talk to you for a half hour or 20 minutes or whatever we spent when Starbucks got a tea about how can we have presentations be more of a discovery process where a person's internal beliefs and hypotheses are being triangulated in semi-real time with the information that they are receiving from us so that they are pretty much just more open because they have something to relate to. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:13) - It's such a good point. Number one, it's almost just like any good show or any good game or any good movie. It literally draws the person into it where they feel like they're a part of it. 

Speaker 2 (00:13:25) - Yes. 

Speaker 1 (00:13:27) - I'll tell you what I love about what you just said, number one, I remember last year was my first tax day. And I remember how exactly like you just said, when they kicked off in the morning, seeing the polling and I immediately, as somebody who's like spent 17 years in the CX space talking to customers, working with customers, I was like, why is it every event? 

Speaker 2 (00:13:47) - They're asking us before we get there, what do you, all of you people are SMEs, you're all in this industry, you all spend 50, 60 hours, 70 hours, some of you 20, 30, 40 years of your life, why don't more people do that? 

Speaker 1 (00:13:58) - Getting upfront feedback or this notion of like, and then number two, there's like this inclusion piece, like you're being involved in the process and then something immediately is interesting about that because then like, whether it's attention levels or whether it's just interest or whether it's just like making you think about things, to your point, it challenges like, wait, shit, I thought I knew. And then in almost real time, 30 to 60 seconds later, you see what a group of, today we've got hundreds of people here. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:26) - So you see what hundreds of other professionals that are doing similar things to us. It's kind of pretty awesome to kind of see what that looks like. Gary, I want to talk about QuestroPress. So you work with all these incredible businesses, you work with all these different customers. Tell me about your experience with QuestroPress, like I know that you've used it, but you were just telling me a second ago before we got into today's session, but like you've worked with all these other solutions. What's it been like working with QuestroPress? 

Speaker 2 (00:14:48) - Yeah, to me, it has nothing to do, it has something to do with the product, but to me, I'm a Qualtrics refugee. I used Qualtrics for 10 years. 

Speaker 1 (00:14:57) - I was hoping you were going to say that, I like that. 

Speaker 2 (00:14:59) - No, and it's true. They used to be awesome partners. They used to have awesome support, awesome, you know, honest sales, good price for a good product. And they lost all of that at a time when really the entire marketplace is losing that. I actually think if I just look around to the service that I get now versus the service that I got in the 90s, it's all worse. It's all less human. It's all, yes. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:31) - So to me, I joined QuestionPro mostly because I knew Vivec just from prior sales engagements and just always remembered that the product was pretty good and I just needed another option. So they were one of the ones that I was looking at and the sales cycle was so fast because they were just responsive, good human beings. And so, you know, Benji Johnson was my sales rep, Debashish, long Indian name, was my product rep and, you know, we got on a trial and they were just awesome, like the kind of people that you can count on. And it has shown. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:18) - It has been that way all year. And it's a, I cannot explain the...

Speaker 2 (00:16:26) - Parting of a dark cloud. That has occurred because when the thing that we use every day- one of the top probably three pieces of software we use to do our work- we can't do our work without a good survey platform. Yes, so if you have a survey platform with terrible service and, you know, questionable product progress and all sorts of fraud issues and all sorts of just crazy stuff we had been through with them, there's no confidence in our own business anymore because we don't have the tools. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:58) - It's like if you're a carpenter and you don't have a, you know you don't have hammers and nails. So I've been so happy and my you know I tell them this all the time. Just don't lose that in a post AI world, it is the human attention, the human touch, the human service and also the service that you should all the active, but it's getting more important, not less, and they seem to really, really live that. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:25) - I love everything you just said. And then it's right and ledger brought up the post AI world because technically we're moving in a, into a direction where some of the things that people like you and I have done for many years now with gathering surveys and getting collecting feedback and running some of these different folks, groups. I just gonna put us in a position where much of this could, should, already, is or will likely become happening in real time. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:53) - Yep, but what's awesome about that is think about- and it's funny because I've had a couple of a couple of awesome guests I've joined us today. They've all said it in slightly different words and slightly different ways, but it's like: what are we doing? We're in this world where, technically, we can get sentiment, we can get people's likes, the dislikes, we can get people's core focus areas or the things they don't give a shit about. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:13) - Frankly, now, right now, whether it's through product usage or whether it's to whatever type of service that you have, or the real-time stuff and signal- I keep calling it signals- generically, you have the signals that we get, and it's funny because a lot of companies aren't even remote, even in the world of AI, as you just said, they're not thinking about it that way. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:30) - So it's such a big opportunity for for different customer and employee focus businesses and product focus business leaders to think about as they're building and scaling their businesses and their teams and and all the things that they're working on. Before it, before we start to wind up. What are you most excited about for the world of market research and customer listening, voice of customer- all the things that you spent so many years doing. What are you, like, the most excited about? We're almost getting, we're getting close to the end of 2024. 

Speaker 1 (00:18:59) - We're all of us are already probably getting ready to start planning- or 2025 planning on jazz. Is there like one or two things that you're super excited about for the future of our space, in the future of people like me and you that are working with customers? Every single solitary death or the customer facing team. 

Speaker 2 (00:19:12) - It's funny. I instantly kind of take the opposite take. I feel like market research is always about simply asking questions and listening to the answers. So I think I'm actually more fearful about the future of our industry than I am confident, especially cuz, like I feel like we have a lot of awesome tools. I actually think market research tends to go very slow, yeah, but but getting back to my original point, like if the point is to have empathy, for example, yeah, I am worried that there's an iceberg of AI that's going to kill empathy. 

Speaker 2 (00:20:02) - Okay, how can a machine that's basically a glorified auto complete text, autocomplete? Yeah, technology at its fundamental? Yeah, how can it translate, activate information to benefit humans if it is not human? Yep, so I worry that we are sailing to an iceberg at a time when I worry less about we small boutique consultants because we don't have a lot of meetings. Yeah, so we have plenty of time to do research, to analyze data and use the AI tools. 

Speaker 2 (00:20:42) - I use them, everybody's gonna use them, but to always have that healthy skepticism, I am terrified at the prospect of staff researchers at clients at large corporations that have six hours of meetings a day, have slack never-ending, have emails that they don't even read anymore, that are trying to squeeze project projects like actual research execution work in the two hours of fatigued time. And it's gonna be so tempting to have AI do the thinking for them. Yeah, and I think that if we go there, we're gonna get into a chronic echo-chamber. 

Speaker 2 (00:21:29) - And even the idea of synthetic data: I actually think that that's really awesome on paper. Let's say you've done a hundred surveys in a space and you haven't asked a question, yeah, and then maybe you can extrapolate those- the sentiment and the information of those hundred- to answer that new question. Great, that's great. But having a person that's done a lot of statistical and kind of like. You know models? Yeah, there's. There's always a point where the basis you're extending too far, you're extrapolating too far. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:59) - You know common examples. 

Speaker 2 (00:22:00) - In media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling, people use different terms but you know, for example, if you've modeled your whole channel efficiency models against a certain amount of spent, okay, and let's say your marketing budget is 100 million dollars a year. 

Speaker 2 (00:22:19) - And then all of a sudden you ask that model, like, what would we do if we spent $200 million a year? 

Speaker 3 (00:22:24) - Well, that's too, we've been in situations with the market, they're like, we can't do that because the model was trained on this data. 

Speaker 2 (00:22:34) - So what I worry about is overextension of the core data and the more that you start to get artificial data into that core data, then it's not core data anymore. Because you could imagine this snowballing effect. So I actually, I'm excited about AI, I'm excited about video question answering and text transcription and all of the great things and kind of having conversational type interviews. But I really worry because human beings, we are wired, our brains take half of our calories or whatever, I forget the number. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:12) - But the whole point of it is we are wired as human beings to be lazy because we need to put so much energy into our brain. So it's why there's a lot of people that joined the gym in January and quit in February. So what I worry is that AI is gonna tap into that primal laziness. And so, yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:35) - Number one, I love that answer. It's super thoughtful, makes a tremendous amount of sense. The other thing too is just, you're right. It's funny, we've had two guests today that said something similar around like the slip, there's a slippery slope. 

Speaker 2 (00:23:50) - Yeah, it's a slippery slope. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:51) - And some people are gonna get tons of excellent positive benefits from leveraging AI, leveraging AI-based solutions, maybe making things quicker and easier and sharper to be able to understand, comprehend. But there's a thought, as you were kind of going through it, that I kept thinking about, which is humans still need to understand short, comprehensible calls to action, or CTAs, that typically require going and talking to other humans. 

Speaker 1 (00:24:19) - And you're right, Gary, we're like, that slows down or if we get too far away from that, that's a muscle memory that could be lost. And then you wonder, you mentioned the empathy skills. What about communication skills? What about interpersonal relationships? That shit can get slippery real fast. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:34) - Yeah, and AI can't teach us that. 

Speaker 3 (00:24:36) - They cannot draw the conclusions. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:37) - I don't want this podcast to be that I'm an AI luddite. 

Speaker 4 (00:24:42) - Let me tell you how I do use it. 

Speaker 5 (00:24:46) - Just... that. 

Speaker 2 (00:24:46) - This is an answer to your original question. The thing that I'm most excited about, as I write reports right now, is when I need a creative agency, I have one. Because I use AI to just the most mundane things that I need to do. I have six paragraphs, condense it into three. But I already wrote the six paragraphs. So that's human thought. But I just need it, so that's great for that. But I use it all the time for storytelling. 

Speaker 3 (00:25:15) - I'm like, you know, I'm in this situation and blah, blah, blah. You know, there's all these things going on. What's a good analogy? 

Speaker 2 (00:25:22) - You know, because people love analogies. Jesus taught with parables, you know. But so the thing that I am excited is if we navigate that slippery slope, that people do the thinking, they analyze the data responsibly from a fundamental first principles, first original data way, or as close as you can. But then use AI for the storytelling, the activation, and the condensation, and the streamlining, and stuff like that. 

Speaker 3 (00:25:55) - So I love when I'm like, I know there's an analogy here. 

Speaker 4 (00:25:59) - Or I know that I'm saying this wrong. Or I know, and the other thing that I use it for is just checking my memory. You know,... this means that, blah, blah, blah. And when I ask, you know, is this accurate? And a lot of times they're like, yeah, it's accurate, but it's technically this. And then you can have a conversation. It's like having a support team at your fingers. 

Speaker 2 (00:26:26) - And that is so exciting from a standpoint of a person that's analytical and creative. 

Speaker 1 (00:26:33) - I love it, I love it, Gary, this is fantastic, brother. 

Speaker 4 (00:26:34) - This is an awesome idea, this is awesome, awesome thoughts. Huge thanks for coming on, and for giving our listeners some of these ideas. Before I let you go, where can people get in touch with you, Gary, and then where can people learn more about ValuDue? Because you do some awesome work, your team does some awesome work, you're already working with these incredible businesses. Where can people get in touch with you? 

Speaker 2 (00:26:52) - Yeah, you can reach me at LinkedIn, Gary, G-A-R-Y-P-A-N-S-I-N-O. Send me a note, don't just say hi. 

Speaker 4 (00:26:59) - Because I never, oh, those are the worst. Hi, this is a business thing, we don't say hi. We say that when you're on Facebook, or whatever, Instagram, or whatever you use. And also just go to ValuDue.com, V-E-L-O-D-U.com. 

Speaker 1 (00:27:16) - Awesome, Gary, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. 

Speaker 4 (00:27:18) - All right, thank you, thank you.