Customer Experience Superheroes - Series 12 Episode 1 - Do B2B Better - Jim Tincher

We kick of series 12 of the CX superheroes podcast series with an industry legend. There can be few people in CX you'd want to spend time with more than Jim Tincher. We were delighted when Jim agreed to be a featured author in the Lexden CX Book Club and share the 'making of' Do B2B Better. This is a book which captures Jim's learnings which he's comfortable enough to point out include failures and successes. In fact, in the discussion it becomes clear it is earlier failures (or lessons) which have informed the later and more frequent successes. 

There are few books dedciated to the art of B2B CX, and as a global b2b CX practitioner himself, host Christopher Brooks is able to have an informed and interrogative discussion on the topic.

Whilst there are few book spoilers in here, the narrative does keep close to the book and Jim's influences and inspiration for it.  Jim might also be the nicest guy in CX. Find out for yourself why he's such a positive energy to be around. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Lexton's Customer Experience Superheroes Podcast. My name is Christopher Brooks, and I'm your host for this series in which we meet inspirational characters from the world of customer experience. Throughout our journey, we've learned many new tricks, techniques, and been introduced to tools that can help organisations improve the outcomes for their customers. Recently we launched the Customer Experience Book Club. So we've been meeting authors as well. Quite often these authors are not just authors, but longstanding practitioners from the world of customer experience. And when I say longstanding, our guest today has the very enviable title of being only the second person to be recognized with a CXPA certification as the owner and lead practitioner in a very well-known and respected consultancy, Heart of the Customer. And now a second time author of the smash hit Do Be to Be Better. We welcome Jim Tincher. Jim is somebody who I've always been a big fan of. I love the work that he does. I love the communications he shares. And I caught up with him to find out more about the man behind the book and understand his ideas and inspiration for the book. And also learn more about how he approaches customer experience. Jim, welcome to the CX Superheroes Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Thank you, Christopher. I'm excited to be here. I always wanted to be a superhero.

SPEAKER_02 2:01

So who was your favorite superhero then?

SPEAKER_00 2:04

I was a big Spider-Man fan growing up. I just love that Peter Parker had all these personal issues. It felt real to me. He was older than I was when I first started reading him. He's younger than me now. But yeah, I always love Spider-Man.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

He's got very dark over the years, hasn't he, Pete? He was quite easy to connect with. As you said, you knew this stuff was going on behind. But over the years, the layers of the onion have revealed more and more about why he is challenged.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, it's gonna be hard as a writer after having character for 40 years and trying to come up with something new. I think that tends to lead to that more darker side. I like the old, happier Spider-Man, the Spidey and Friends Spider-Man, which still had problems making the payments work or paying for their rent as rent while also trying to maintain friendships and dating while also saving the city. Yeah, that's the version of Spider-Man I like a lot.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Our superheroes in CX. So there are inspirational figures like yourself, Jim, who have continued to give back to the community and share what you want. It's one of the superhero traits is you're sharing everything in the spirit of progress that lock it away. And your book, Do Be to Be Better, is a perfect example of that where you've poured into your book. It feels like a lifetime and a half's worth. I don't know how many hours in the day you must work, but there's a lot in here. And not only that, you've got that proverbial memory like an elephant, or a lot of very good mole skinner notebooks that you've been keeping over the years because it's a lot of rich content in there. And that's really what we want to talk about today. It's not the book, but you, the man behind the book, to understand how you got to the point of creating do be to be better, and also get behind some of the stories in there. Because obviously we can work all the way back to your time working in in organizations and being honest about where it didn't work so well and how you use that as lessons to develop and create the level of CX you help organizations with today.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Excellent. Yeah, it was many years the making coming to this book. Wrote one before that, but this is really the book I wanted to read.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

And that's what led to its publishing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

The majority of my work is in B2B. But I think you have to be quite naive to not realize there are parallels here with a much broader audience as well. So I think as part of our book club, you're obviously our next author, and we're delighted to have you on. And thank you so much for putting your hand up so readily. Uh, we were tentative, wondering whether you would be interested, but you're gratefully came back and said, Absolutely. So we're delighted. And we will have some guests who are guest members who are not in B2B. I'm sure that hopefully when they've read the book, they'll bring that discussion to the table as well. And I like the way I was just reading about the preface about yourself, Jim, and it feels CX landed on you rather than you landing on CX. It feels like when you started in business, you were working, and all of that realization that what sector you were in, and maybe it wasn't even called that at the time. Take us back to that moment where you realized experience is a way that we can do business.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

My very first job out of college, I had worked in tech support, moved to pre-sales tech support, and I was going to visit my girlfriend, now my wife, Sue, out on the East Coast of the US. And I went to one of our sales leaders and said, I'm there, I'd like to visit a customer. He said, What? Why would you want to do that? And I didn't know how to answer that question. Isn't that just what you do? I've since learned that is not what most people do. But I was just curious about customers. And I spent all my time at the corporate office, and I wanted to get out and see what how real people use our products. And that's really where it began. There was not a conscious decision, it's just who I am. From there, I went and I joined a training company, and I eventually became in charge of all of our IT training. And so I would spend a lot of time reading the magazines IT leaders read, visiting them, going to their conferences just to learn more about them. And in small business, which what this was, you pretty much have to be customer focused anyway. From there, I went to Best Buy, being very customer focused. And at that point, I'm so side note, I'm can be naive. And I just thought every company was customer obsessed. That's just how you operate, that your customer obsessed is how you do it. Like there's a federal bureau of customer obsession. That means you must go out and visit customers and you must think about them. I've since learned there is no such federal bureau. And that from there I went and joined a large health insurance organization. And that was a shock because I realized there were other models. And what blew me away is that literally nobody in marketing or product development had ever met a client.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

And what that's about the clients, we would sell our product, a health savings account, to employers who would offer it to their employees. And so the client or consumer. We are consumers. So we know what consumers want. My boss had eight different health savings accounts, seven more than anybody else in the world. But it was not we were making the products we wanted to buy. Yeah. But we were so overinformed that our needs were completely different from our population. And as a result, we built the most complex products on the market. So, okay, no big deal. We led the nation in sales. We had a great sales organization. We had we're part of a massive company. And so we just got sales from that. We also led the nation on the percentage of customers canceling their accounts every year. And so when you have the biggest volume and the biggest percentage of people canceling accounts, that means way more people are canceling your accounts than anybody else's. But one of the things I learned there is that growth can cover up a multitude of sins. And so nobody was really focused on the fact that we had all this churn going on because for every customer that left, three more came in. That drove me nuts. Couldn't we be a lot more effective? We could make this a simpler experience. And that's really where I got the bug for customer experience.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Is in those days. And they created a role for me. I didn't have the phrase customer experience. This has been like 14 years ago. It was out there, but I hadn't run across it. So I called it customer insights. But it's a real CX101 role of do the research and then try to drive the organization to act differently to think about the customer. And I made a deliberate decision that anybody listening to this will know was a bad one, which is I'm going to create a bottom-up revolution. I'm going to work with the frontline staff to get them to be more customer focused, and then we'll come on up to the top. Listeners, it does not work that way. I was the most popular employee for about 90 to 180 days. And then I was not. Always a bad sign, since he was my boss's boss, and said, Jim, you make a lot of noise. And he repeated that phrase numerous times because, yeah, I created noise. I'm trying to change the organization to create better customer experience. But I since from that time, I've learned better practices. That's what got me curious is that I created a lot of change for about three to six months and then it stopped. And so I was really curious about how these other organizations are able to maintain a focus of the customer to change their whole culture to focus on the customer. And one of the things I recognized years later is what I missed was I had the world's best business problem right there in front of me. The fact that our churn was so high, if I had just taken a half an hour to turn that churn into dollars and say, here's how much money we're losing every year from our churn. I want to fix that problem. Leadership would have been all on board. They'd have been there and say, yes, how do we help you? Instead, I led with customers are frustrated. So response was, no, they aren't. Yes, they are. No, they aren't. Very unproductive conversation. But that was one of the keys I learned talking to the successful six leaders is that their outcome isn't a survey score, customer satisfaction at promoter score. Their outcome are dollars. And that was a big learning. Somebody had told me that 14 years ago, maybe I'd still be there. I'm happy I'm not, but still, I might have been way more successful if I'd have thought from the beginning of how do I take my work and turn it into dollars for the organization. But though I've spent the last 14 years trying to understand why some organizations are so much more successful than others, yeah, trying to encapsulate that.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

And I think it would what you say there, that concept that think of the customer as a currency is one that's so helpful. As you say, you're clear evidence of that. You work really hard, create a lot of noise, a lot of frames in certain parts of the organization. And probably those changes would would have made a big difference. But because of the language, it just was knocking against. We always talk about whether it was at Harford or Stanford or the UK Cranfield, you picked up your kind of your economics masters and you look there and it says shareholder value at the detriment of customer and environment. And then you're rocking up there and saying we'll make things better for customer, and you're looking going, This doesn't work. Apparently, this doesn't work. So it's it's not just changing the kind of the culture of the company, it's changing someone's educational understanding from a long time ago. And that's really difficult, isn't it? So I think it's fascinating that you recognize that rather than CX doesn't work, you recognize hang on, it's the way in which I can this is a business practice, it has to be seen as a business practice as well, if I'm going to compete with other business practices.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

So yeah, Chris, you're 100% right there.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

Yeah, sorry, carry on.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

The Exome Institute just came out a little while ago with the up latest update on the state of the B2B customer experience. And when they look at what's getting in your way, the number one item is other competing priorities. And you take a typical CEO and you go to the CEO and you say, Hey, I've got this new idea, it's going to raise our NPS by 20 points, net promoter score, they might be interested. But if somebody else comes up and say, I can save us a million dollars, you know who's going to get funded. And it's not you.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Yeah.

unknown 13:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

That's what I didn't understand in the past, is that if I had come back and said we're losing, it's on the order of probably 20 to 30 million dollars in churn we were getting. And say I can we're losing 20 to 30 million dollars in revenue. If we can cut that in half, well, that's easy math, 10-15 million dollars in revenue. Are you interested in solving that problem? Oh, yeah, I'd have people all over the place instead of saying we're frustrating customers, let's fix it.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

And so at that point, what I find quite interesting, Jim, is at that point, there was probably in a parallel universe as you've given up and going and doing something completely different, going off saying this just too hard. But instead, you decided to carry on walking into the storm and decided I'm gonna, I've got I know making creating better outcomes is in me, which I think it isn't for everyone. I think uh creating better outcomes for me is in some people, but creating better outcomes for others is in very few people, the true CXs. So clearly you had that gene that's in you, that's there. But and now you've come across this business challenge, this real business challenge, which is not uh one specific to that organization. It's so uh what maybe it was a naivety again, but what possessed you then to go again and actually say, How do I break this? How do I get to a point? Well, you've got to now where people will listen to you and they will change their business strategy to focus on the customer, which is what you were trying to do in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

That's the irony of it. I left there eventually, just I was not having the impact I wanted. I joined a large consultancy that was focused on employee engagement. And as much as I like that, it wasn't really, I was more of a customer guy. And so that didn't work out. And I got fired. So actually, it wasn't me just leading, I got fired. That was not a fit. I joined a research organization. And uh, after about six, eight months there, they came to me one day and said, You're in sales now. I said, What? Yeah, you're in sales now. Oh, okay, great. So I get to drop my projects, right? Oh no, you still have to do those. Okay, I get leads, right? Oh no, we don't have any leads. I get a takeover existing accounts, right? No, we need new business. Okay, but you're in sales go. Oh, by the way, could you update the website while you're at it? Okay, get ready for complete shock. Uh, about 10 months later, I was fired because I hadn't sold enough. Like, great. But while I was there, I was asked to write a journey map. Yep. And I had no idea what a journey map was. Um, what is this? And my boss said, here you go. Here's a template you can use. And it was a PowerPoint slide with some bubbles on it. And Christopher, I got offended. You can't take the riches of the customer experience and represent it with some bubbles on a PowerPoint slide. It's got to be richer, more immersive, which is what led to I wrote a blog post saying that here's how I would create a journey map. And here's an example visualization. Now I'm not a graphic designer, but it's putting some ideas out there. And it went viral, viral for CX. Yeah, not cat video viral, but it had about 60,000 people had read it when I was fired. And I was number one on Google. Now keep in mind, I was fired because I couldn't sell. But I thought I'm tired of getting fired. It happened two years apart. Maybe there's a business here to take that passion of the customer, take this Google search on journey mapping, and turn that into something. And so part of that, again, I was very curious. I talked to everybody I could find in customer experience to help me build our practice. And that is turned into the company we have today. So it really came into the fact that I had an entry into customer experience with a unique product, journey mapping. And for the first five years, that's pretty much what we did. But then over time, I got curious again. And customer think came out some research, been about four years ago now, showing that only one out of four programs can actually show any value for the work they do. I thought, wow, that's not very good. I was actually a contributor to that, but I didn't contribute to the research. They used some of my quotes afterwards in the reaction to that. And I was sitting around talking to my team, and this was in January 2020, and said, What do we think is the reason for that? What do the one in four programs do that's different from the rest? And we had some hints from the research, but we wanted to go deeper. And so we spent a couple of days, we built this hypothesis of what it was called the journey experience framework. And we had it very detailed, laid out, it's fantastic. And then we said, let's go validate that. Now, those who have read my writing know I hate the approach of validating. I don't think you should validate. I think you should throw away your hypotheses and just hop in and said, just go and be curious. Yeah. So that's essentially what we did is we threw away our hypotheses, went out, and I spent, I reached out to these organizations that I knew were rock stars. Those that we just saw incredible advancement of the CX program. And so I reached out specifically to Roxy Strollinger at UKG. And I also reached out to the folks at Dow. At that time, it was Jen Zamora. She's now gotten promoted to another role, but it was her at the time. And I said to each of them, I want to just follow you for a couple of days. Just want to hang out with you. Um, and so I did that in late January and early February of 2020. So luckily, just in time for the world shutdown. But yeah, so I spent two days first with Roxy. And if you think that being on Zoom meetings all day is exhausting, try watching somebody being on Zoom meetings all day long. That is that's that is that'll wipe you out. But Roxy was so open, she shared everything she was doing, and it blew me away because it didn't match our hypotheses at all. Oh wow. And uh, so one of the things I learned, this is getting a little bit, I don't want to get too much of the book. I know we're gonna talk about that later, but I just hadn't realized how much she brought in the organizational data into our Qualtics platform, right? So she could say, when we this changes in the survey, here are all the downstream financial impacts to that change. Here are the operational impacts that change. When she talked about, for example, that I don't think this is in the book, but people who use people who are use our online community generate less calls to the context of it, calls of support. Well, that makes sense, but she could prove it. Yeah, and so then that helps to get budget to support the online community because you can see that it's actually they're not deflecting calls, they're not preventing them, they're preventing the need for them.

SPEAKER_02 20:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

So I've stayed there in I was down in South Florida, and I went there on a Wednesday and Thursday, and I brought my wife with me because Southern Florida in the wintertime, beautiful, and we got our arrangements for Wednesday, Thursday, and then Sue tried finding us hotels the rest of the weekend because we're staying the weekend. And I know you have a less US-oriented audience, but I will recommend anybody going to Southern Florida in a January-February time frame to make sure there isn't a Super Bowl in town that weekend. So we couldn't find any hotels, it was super expensive. So, anyway, that vacation was ruined, but I learned a lot. From there, I flew to Midland, Michigan, which is a small city in the central, upper central Midwest, and uh spent two days with Dow and interviewed a whole bunch of the folks and followed Jen. And uh, one of the things that this is in the book, but I want to call it out because it's my very favorite customer experience business problem ever. And uh, she was sharing their dashboards. And they we had done journey mapping work with them, and they took our work, we worked with them to identify what is the data that reflects what organizational data, for example, operational data, reflects the customer experience. For example, on time delivery, the percentage of time you deliver on time, highly correlated to how customers feel about you. And she showed me her dashboard, which was fabulous. I put a wireframe in the book, I couldn't show the actual data. But then she said, we have a problem in that. We only have a thousand Qualtrics licenses for our dashboards. And we've run out of licenses. Wait, say that again? Yeah, yeah. We've got over a thousand executives who are trying to log into our dashboard. We have to start shutting some of the lower level executives down because we don't have enough licenses. Wow. That is not a problem. Anyone else I know has. They ended up negotiating with Qualtrics for unlimited licenses. But I love that example that she had created something that was so highly sought after that that over a thousand executives going to it. And Ricardo Porte is now the leader. And he was telling me that they're still at that level. They're still seeing a thousand hits every quarter from different people coming in to see their dashboards. And I knew dashboards, I intellectually knew dashboards mattered. It makes sense. It's there. I never realized the power of a great dashboard until I was with Dow and saw how they were connecting the operational data with the sentiment data. And the executives wanted to see the operational data.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

That's why they came. But they were also then exposed to what that means to customers.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

And that really helped Dow drive that customer impact.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:17

That's fascinating. Fascinating. I think it is that level of understanding of the insight that comes out in the book. And it's interesting you talk about it was originally kind of customer insight was that space because I get the impression from reading you you probably spend a bit too much time going deeper. What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean? And although you can never spend too much time, but do you know what I mean? You're fascinated by let's try and understand that, let's put the pieces together. So when it comes to heart of the customer, I'd imagine proportion of your work and then proportion of the work is actually helping organizations make sense of it, put it into place, create sustainable models so that the business can transform. That is obviously a very rewarding career to have. But at what point did you decide you want to spill this into a book? Because there are some, and there are some who spill into a book and you just feel like you've run out of track. Whereas for yourself, it feels like I need to get it out of my head to clear some space to go again. So at what point did you decide? Was it you who decided or did others mention it to you? How did that come about?

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Well, the first book I wrote was much more of we should write a book, let's write a book. This was not that.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

Yeah, this was never meant to feel like this. This feels really different. You know, it doesn't feel like Jim needs a book on the shelf. This feels Jim's got something to say.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Well, and the phrase you used is exactly what I said to my wife, because she said, Why are you doing this? This is taking you so much time. I I can't imagine how many hours. So it was 200 hours of interviews, let alone the analysis, the writing, everything else. And I just said what you said. I can't get this out of my head. I cannot stop thinking about how what I learned from these interviews is not reflected in the literature. And just tying it a little bit. So the four key actions of the change makers connect to financials. Okay, that's how to do that, I think, is a little bit unique, but everybody says you got to talk to financial. That alone is not terribly unique. But the idea of measuring emotions, yeah. I hadn't run across that, but there was a Harvard Business Review article from about 10, 15 years ago, but it was all about consumers. In B2B, measuring emotions. I still have people look at me crosswise when I say that. And bringing in the what I call the customer ecosystem data, the operational, behavioral, financial, and descriptive data. Roxy and then, so I had two technical editors of the book. One was Roxy, the other was Andrea Kronberg, who was in my first book when she's with the YMCA, she's now with Kelly Services, and they both helped me really think through the role of data. And then this notion of change management, which everybody knows change management is important, but very few actually have a very deliberate approach.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

And so hearing all this and hearing the real stories played out, it's I just couldn't stop thinking about it. And so that's what led to the book is how do I get out of my head out into the world? And because I would I was just thinking about all the time. And again, Sue kept saying over and over again, why are you doing this to yourself? You could just work and that would be fine, but instead of spending your nights writing this book, but I just couldn't not write it.

SPEAKER_02 26:32

And did so one day your publishers, yeah, how was the relationship with them? We're talking about this the second time around with them. Did they did you have editorial control or have you had to manipulate it to reach your audience? Because obviously, what I find very fascinating about business books is your audience really is going to benefit from reading this. So you probably arguably know your audience better than your publisher, but your publisher is going to have an interest in making sure it reaches a wide audience.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

What I so I went out to multiple publishers, and there was one very large publisher who said, This is ready to go. We'll do a little editing. Bam, we can have this out there in 90 to 180 days. Said, no, I don't think it's ready. And Maggie said, This book needs a lot of work. Oh, okay. That's refreshing to hear. I want to hear it needs a lot of work. I had to pay for that work, but they provided me with an editor. And I originally had it as four chapters. And she said those magic keywords that got me, which is that does not make a great reading experience. Oh, she got me the experience card. Yes. And she's right. And they so the editor helped me cut it down to or cut not cut it down, but separate into 12 chapters. He also came out with an idea that I'd never considered, which I think is a good thing, which is we had a fictional character, change maker Kari. Kari, yeah, who would apply the changes throughout that came straight from the editor. I never had that.

SPEAKER_02 28:03

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

And that's my wife's favorite part of the book. She loves Kari and how Kari learns by everything.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

You can you can jump, you can do an Akari version. You can just jump and read Kari's bits. I think that's it's a magical bit. You can just lift it up, and then you've got this different. It's it sounds different when you read that, just those pieces. So I think it's a I think it's a really good idea. I've not seen it before, and I love it. I assumed it was you should take credit for it, Jim. I said, Oh, we do that every day ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

Well, we do a lot of stories, but the whole notion of somebody walking through it, that was so the also another change they made, the original version of the book had didn't have the four case studies repeated every section. It had all kinds of case studies coming in, coming out. And I had to decide do I mention that Bill was mentioned three chapters ago. You remember him, go back on this page, or do I not do that? They said no. Choose a few case studies, bring them up every section, and then the rest you can only bring up once.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

But so what I did with Bill is I gave him a lot of room. That's how I made up for that. I just gave him a lot, but that also made it a lot easier to read. And I only had to introduce the four case studies. I gave him a full introduction and then a little bit of reminder in the first section. After that, yeah, referencing them. But that again, they helped make it better for the reader. And so I had a great experience working with them.

SPEAKER_02 29:28

Yeah. But I think, and I don't know, I guess this is the case, is with a business book, quite often you'll pick it up and you'll put it down. You may not come to it, it's not like your your fictional book where you'll read it religiously for 10 pages of a night. It doesn't quite happen like that, does it? And I find that sometimes, oh, look, I've got 15 minutes before the next meeting, I'm gonna grab a book out, but I'm not that's not gonna be every day that happens. It might be the next meeting finishes earlier. What shall I do? I'm gonna grab a coffee and I'm gonna read. So to have the ability to have that, those connecting points throughout, I can see the logic of that because I can't pick up a thread with a business book, it's not and then they put in the knife on what happened next, it's it's so I have to say, I mean, they've it has helped, hasn't it? Massively, it's so it's a really easy read, and there's a lot of connection as you go through it. So you actually enjoyed because obviously someone coming and saying it needs a lot of work, you could have been like, Oh, okay, fine, I'm going back into my shell and I won't come out again, but you embraced that and you accepted the change.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

Oh, yeah, yeah, because I knew it it needed work just intuitively. I'm not okay. I've written one book before, yeah. And that one, the publisher said, Oh, we'll help you with the editing. Great. The editing was essentially adding Oxford commas. Okay, as valuable as those are, I knew it needed more than that. And the first book didn't get that, so I wanted somebody who would help me craft something better, and yeah. So when she said that, I said, Okay, Maggie, that wonder wells for me. She had a real vision for what the book could be.

SPEAKER_02 31:01

And now, by having these four cases in there, obviously now those bit part extras that become main characters. We get to know the brands as we go through. How did you get that balance just right? Because you need to share a lot with us so that we can understand the context, which is quite often lost, isn't it? Especially with these are being B2B, quite often they're industries that we may not know. So you need to understand the context, but at the same time, you don't want another executive in the business picking it up and going, Why's our strategy in Jim's book? So, how did how did you get that balance right? So you felt you were sharing what feels like, wow, these are really interesting gems, but at the same time, you're doing it with the protection and respect of your because these are some of these are clearly our friends now if they're helping you with the book, not just business colleagues. How did you get that?

SPEAKER_00 31:47

Oh, they're very much our friends, yeah. And I tried being really transparent with that up front, I said, okay, you'll get a chance to review it. And there were a few things taken out that were overly specific, yeah, other things that were fixed because I heard them wrong. Uh, but they had the I offered up front the ability to review it. And I was, and clearly, if they're one of my main case studies, I'm not going to say, and they suck at all this. So there was that too, but yeah. But I was so if we look at Roxy and Jen specifically, Nancy as well, the transparency they offered was unbelievable. First of all, I think it helped that what they're sharing represents them well as a brand. But we have a conference in September in coming up September 12th, do be to be better. Imagine that. Coming up here, and last year, the first one, I had Roxy speak, and she was so good I brought her back again. She's very compelling. I had Ricardo from Dow speak last time as well, and he was the first speaker after me. And he spent 25 minutes just answering a simple question. A challenging stakeholder asked him, What's the role of inventory in my business? And what does CX have to say about that? And he spent 25 minutes walking us through how he answered that question from things like when the level of the inventory gets too low, operational data, that we start to see in the survey confidence in Dow as a supplier drops, sentiment data or experiential data. When that drops below a certain threshold, then we see future orders drop, behavioral data. When those future orders drop, of course, we really receive less margin. And so you are trading up by dropping inventory below a certain threshold today. You are impacting eBIT in multiple future quarters.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Now it was a 25-minute talk going through exactly how he answered that question. And he got done. Everybody looked at him and said, Oh, because they hadn't really thought about that. And then I had Nancy talking about emotions there. And so she brought in her work on emotions. I had Roxy talk about the four requirements of a great CX leader. And so it's just I had six speakers that most of which were from the book. I had Sam talk about how she creates a synthetic NPS based on the operational behavioral data. I had then Lori Englert talk about change management. And I brought in Amy Lucas, who was not part of the book, but is a rock star. So I brought her in to speak as well about change management. But so I put the book, but they are all my friends. We talk regularly.

SPEAKER_01 34:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

And it's great to get together with them.

SPEAKER_02 34:30

So there's a bit of a club associated with the book now, I think. It's wonderful. We're grateful that we're going to step into your club or you're going to step into our club and spend some time going through the book. What would you hope to get from this experience?

SPEAKER_00 34:45

It's coming back to what we said earlier, the voices in my head, get them out of my head and get them out into the world. The work that I came across from these people, real people doing real work. And that's what I'm really interested in. I lead this Customer Experience Professional Association here in Minneapolis. I did until a year ago. And my rule was that vendors don't speak. No, I'm a vendor. But in my perspective, I want to know what the real people are doing. Vendors are not real people. Yep. But I want to hear from those who are really doing the work. And that's what I want to get out of this book club, is help people understand and to be inspired.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

To recognize how the Roxys of the world, how the, you know, how the Nancy's of the world, the Ricardo's and Jens are able to do that work that we all aspire to do. It's possible to do it and to get a view into their world. That's what I want readers to get is that it is possible to completely change your organization to be customer focused. It just takes a lot of very deliberate work.

SPEAKER_02 35:50

Excellent. Because we were talking to Annette Friends, and she was sharing with us that Neil Top for Callzilla basically took her book and applied it to his business and kind of it transformed what he was doing. And this is what we're looking for is for people to be brave enough to take what they hear and what they learn, go back to their business and apply it with the confidence that other organizations have done the same. So, you know, exactly what you say there, bring into life the Nancy's have done this. Understand this is they were in a position where it wasn't working and they've transformed and got to this particular point. Very excited to hear that. And I guess obviously, in the world of B2B, the when we talk about the numbers and the data, sometimes it's thin, sometimes it's not there, it's not available, and it's not been something that's been a focus in the past, so it's not as good quality or as abundant in the present. So I'm really interested to hear kind of creatively how you get around that until you've got a point where perhaps the confidence is in is there to invest in the data. So hopefully some of our guests will be picking you up on those sorts of points as well.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Hopefully so, and push me on that. And that data often is uh available on B2B organizations, you just may not have permission to get it. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, yeah. And so, how do you build, use that change management to help the organization understand it's in their interest to let you access the data?

SPEAKER_02 37:11

What's really interesting, Jim, is we've spoken to a few people in the books so far this year, but the proportion of time you're spending talking about change management reflects the world in which I'm in more than I've heard before. So it's very interesting to hear you putting such an emphasis on the importance of that as well, which I think is not just in B2B, but in B2B, you do have real specialists. You find, don't you, quite often you have lifers. If I've done chemicals or if I've done agri or whatever it is I'm in, that's what I know. And I've been through all the competitors as opposed to I've jumped all over the place. You have people who really know their stuff, and this is how we've always done it. Why are we doing it differently? So that change management is a very important kind of foundation stone in the work that you do.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

Oh, yeah, it all falls apart without it. And you referenced earlier about some of your book club members are not in B2B. That's okay because the four actions apply to any type of organization. Yeah, the decision to call it do b2b better was more of a marketing decision because there just are no resources out there for B2B. No, absolutely. If you're working for a software company, applying Worby Parker work does work just doesn't help. You can't really and see a case study of Target or Best Buy US retailers, but that doesn't help if you are in an IT consultancy. If you're in a law firm, all these B2B type organizations have different needs, and that's why we went after that, is because there's just nothing for that. But the actions apply to any type of organization.

SPEAKER_02 38:46

I'm sure they'll discover that for themselves, but I'm grateful you have done it because we work in many countries. If you're working in Thailand, they say, Can you share some B2B examples from Thailand? You're really scratching around for them. So to be I'm no help on that, but to just show actually, no, let's just look at some B2B organizations and use these organizations that you share. It does is a space that we needed to have filled. Because I think unfortunately, and you've probably come across this as well, in many B2B, as soon as you you raise a kind of a direct-to-consumer or a mass market type proposition example, they'll say that just won't work in our world. And you think, I know it will, but I can understand why it's not going to, because you're not going to let it, because you won't be prepared to accept that. So we needed this book. We needed this book.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Thank you. That's yeah, it's been great to see it get accepted with people for that exact reason. Is that here we have real B2B examples instead that we can actually apply? Brilliant, brilliant.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

I'm off on holiday for two weeks, and this is going to be my reading. This is coming with me, so I can go through it. I'm really looking forward to we've got a QA session where the members will respectfully question and try and probe into the book and find out some of the truths, get underneath some of the topics, and then we'll have the principles to practice where we'll take some aspects of the book and just demonstrate how in a real working environment you can actually bring them to life. So, really looking forward to spending some time with you, Jim. Thank you so much for giving up your time for this podcast and so glad to finally get you as one of our superheroes.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Christopher, I'm grateful to be part of this. I love your approach, and that workshop at the end is going to be a lot of fun. Interesting. Okay, Jim.

SPEAKER_02 40:22

Take care. Thanks ever so much.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

Thank you.