Yvonne Heimann [00:00:01]:
Hey there and welcome back to another episode of She Is A Leader. And today I am super excited to bring you a conversation that might just completely change how you think about growing your business. If you've ever struggled with getting your marketing and your sales team on the same page or if you wonder whether you are tracking the right numbers in your business, this episode is going to be for you.
My guest today Laura breaks down why putting your customers first and at the center of everything, not just saying you do but really doing it, is the only way to grow sustainably. She's going to share practical examples and simple questions you can ask yourself to see if you are truly customer focused. And what I love the most about my conversation with Laura is how she cuts through the noise and shows us the difference between tactics and actual strategies, something many business owners mix up. So grab a notebook because I promise you, you'll want to write down at least a few of Laura's insights that could transform how you run your business moving forward.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:30]:
So I would like to introduce you today to Laura Patterson who co founded Vision Edge Marketing in 1999 and has worked with customers around the world. Her firm helps companies grow faster through data driven insights strategy. Customer centricity. There comes the German back. You know I love me a good tongue twister. Performance management and operational excellence as well as working with that knowledge transfer for teams. She even wrote the five star book about it. Fast track your business. A customer centric approach to grow. Laura has won numerous awards. Damn Girl. Including Angadi's top 30 marketing influencers, the top 200 thought leaders, Pigtails top 100 influencer award and the 20 woman to watch in business by Sales Lead Management Association. That is quite the collection and welcome Laura
I'm so happy to have you today. And as my audience knows, that combination of customer centric and data was exactly the reason why I wanted to have you today. So welcome to the episode.
Laura Patterson [00:03:00]:
Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here and if we can make sure your community walks away with at least one good idea that will be make me feel happy.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:11]:
I'm. I have a feeling based on doing my research on you and looking at all the things you are offering free as well as paid that they are gonna walk away with not just one, but probably even two aha moments. Now I would love to dive into this idea of customer centricity. Guys, hang with me. I might have a couple of tongue twisters today with those C's in there. Just makes the German even more cute. Right? So you are focusing on being customer centric and you're talking about that this is really the only way to achieve sustainable, profitable growth. Could you share with me in the audience an example of how a company has transformed when they truly or how a company can transform or how a client of yours has transformed when they truly embrace that principle of being customer centric.
Laura Patterson [00:04:11]:
I'd love to. And I think just to make sure we're all on the same page about what we're talking about. Customer centricity is really about putting your customer at the center of the way you run your company and the decisions that you make. Right. It isn't necessarily about catering to every.
Customer request or every win.
That's really not what we're talking about. But it's really thinking about how do.
We create both customer value and business value.
Because the purpose of a business is.
To create a customer and therefore and then ultimately not Only to create that customer, but to keep that customer and grow the value of that customer within your organization. So it's very easy to get enamored with what we make and sell and when we are focused and enamored with what we sell and we're trying to tell people, look, how cool our stuff.
Is, whether that's a SaaS application or another product or a service, you know, how cool we are, how great we are, we're really not being customer centric. We're kind of being kind of product centric. Just think about the language there, right? Or if we're really out and are all about internally making the number, you know, focused on the pipeline, getting the leads, that's the whole conversation internally. That's probably a sales centric organization, right? So customer centric organizations don't really talk in that language as much as a sales centric organization would talk in that language. So companies are realizing, and it's not new, this transition of the customer being in the driver's seat has been going on for a while. There have been other organizations that talk about us being in the age of the customer or the customer engagement economy, all of those kinds of language. So it's not new. But I think the implications to especially B2B companies have increased.
And as we move into what appears to be more uncertain times, the ability to connect with, have the right conversations with, engage with, deliver value to your customer is going to be really important. So I hope that was helpful and.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:28]:
I love how you brought up that customer centric doesn't mean we have to say yes to everything. It doesn't mean some of my audience is going to love this one. Doesn't mean customer is king. Because let's be honest, there are situations where our company and, and, and the goals and the values just simply don't align with that specific person. There's other companies there that can serve better than we can. However, knowing what and who our customer is and knowing exactly what are they struggling with, what are they looking for, how can we help them? And knowing who that customer is and then making it around the customer completely changes the language. I'm like, we, we seen it in our business.
I've seen it with my clients and my coaching clients. Where perfect example, right? When it's sales focus, just go on LinkedIn and look into the cold emails we are getting regularly on LinkedIn, right? Hey, I just launched this. Hey, I have this. It's sales focused. And honestly all of them get you in the trash. And if you message me too many times like that and being too sales focused, I'm gonna block you. Not only that, because sometimes once in a while and it becomes so easy. Being customer centric, meaning asking the questions, you can cold outreach and be like, hey, what are you struggling with? What do you need right now? What is this? What is your plan for this year? My favorite question is like, what do you want to accomplish this year? What do you need to make it happen? Who can I connect you with? How can I serve you? And I'd be like, here's your solution.
Not even knowing if I need it. So I love your approach, being customer centric and focusing on serving our clients and not just be like, hey, here's the next offer, here's the next offer. But actually having that conversation. Now, how do you take that company goal of being customer centric and actually kind of like roll it out? Because you want to get your team on board, you want to get the language right, but we also still need to look at numbers, right? So how connects being customer centric as our company goal with metrics, performance and our team, how do you make that work? How do you get the team on board?
Laura Patterson [00:09:04]:
Great question. And I also love your point about service before commerce. Right? That's really what you're saying. How can we be of service? So one of the questions I always ask our customers that we work with is, do you know what success is for your customers? Right. Because that's an important question. And another question that we often ask is, do you know what it is of value to your customers? And more importantly, do you know what you bring to the table that is of value to your customers? All the answers to those questions take data, right? So leading into your point, we do have to have insights from data, and we need to know the right questions to ask.
And we also need to be thinking before we ask those questions, what is it we know? What is it we need to know in order to be more customer centric? And one of the ways I can.
Begin to tell whether a company is close or far away from customer centricity is when I look at their strategic plan or their operational plan or their sales plan or their marketing plan, their customer service plan. Because if the outcomes and objectives aren't framed in customer terms, odds are they're a sales centric or a market centric or a product centric company. What do I mean by that? So let's envision or imagine that we're working with a company. And I asked them, to your point, what would success look like for you by the end of the fiscal year or whatever the time horizon might be. And they give me a revenue number. That's a very common answer. It would be X number of dollars in revenue. Well, companies don't market to buckets of revenue, right? We don't sell to buckets of revenue.
Laura Patterson [00:10:57]:
So my question usually is, tell me a little more, what kind of customers are going to comprise that revenue? What percentage or number of customers you have today? Are you expecting to be a part of that revenue? What will they be buying from you? What new customers do you need to acquire? What kinds of new customers do you need to acquire? Where are they? What is the value proposition or solution that you're bringing to the table, problem you're solving or aspiration you're helping them achieve? All back to data, right? So the first place to start in rolling out your customer centricity approach is by being framing things in customer centric outcomes. That's a great way to start because it will make you think about, okay, I've got X whatever it is, million dollars in revenue and X percent of those million dollars is going to go come from these customers. X percent of these million dollars is going to come from these customers and so forth and so on. Then the more granular you can get, for example, new customers in XYZ market or new customers that are this size and the more your team understands, back to your question about alignment of the team.
The more your team understands exactly what success for your company looks like in terms of customers, the better you can mobilize them to achieve that because they won't just be running around, right, trying to do something like get revenue. Well, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Yvonne Heimann [00:12:27]:
And I love you already started started touching on this. You and we, a lot of us do this right? When, when we ask, when we ask for goals, we often go into that sales mode of specific numbers. What are our sales look like and all the things. So, so when I looked at a couple of your case studies that you have on your website with some of your clients, you mention to, to work on breaking down those silos because a lot we are focused on sales, right? We need numbers, we need our profit, we need the revenue coming in. But marketing doesn't work. Again, as you said, we are not selling to those income buckets, we are selling to people. So bringing together the sales side of our company and the marketing side of our company, in one of your case studies you mentioned to improve integration, collaboration and operational efficiency. And so I'm curious now that we've talked about sales silo and the marketing silo that often they don't talk the same language as we just found out.
How do we really integrate those, how do we get out of those silos? And what are those common barriers you have seen that prevents marketing teams from achieving their full potential? And really stepping into this to be able to talk and work with the sales team and get that, get that integration going.
Laura Patterson [00:14:04]:
Great question, Yvonne. I love that question. And one of the, and one of the questions I ask when we're working with a company and it's not just marketing and sales that gets siloed, product gets siloed, implementation gets siloed, customer service gets siloed, service delivery gets siloed. Right. So. And there's a lot of other touch points inside the company that interact with a customer. Your accounting organization, they'll. The shipping organization, whatever it might be.
Right. So all those touch points have to be. Have clarity around it. So what I often ask when I'm working with a company is tell me how you align your organization. Tell me a little bit about how you're aligned, and that will give me insight. And one of the things that we have found helpful is do you understand the customer's buying journey and the individual Personas in that journey? And how, how have you aligned your.
Organization around that journey?
And that journey being all the way.
To the time that they become a customer and beyond. So they become a customer, they remain a customer, they become an advocate, hopefully, or ambassador for your company, maybe a referral for your company, maybe they help you expand your footprint into the rest of the company they're in or whatever that is and past that first purchase, especially in B2B. Right?
So pass that. And then my question is, well, how is your organization aligned to that process? Because if the organization is aligned to the customer, then the handoffs will be much smoother because then you can say, okay, here's that whole journey. And when we come to this point in the journey, this is the handoff process.
And that's a much better way to think, in my opinion, a much better way to do alignment. I am not a fan of the Waterfall, mql, SQL, sal and all that other acronyms. I'm not a fan of that because they're FMS and they get away from the journey. And what I really believe is that if we align to the journey, we have clarity about where they are in the journey, then that will help ensure that we deliver the right customer experience. And in the end the right customer value.
Yvonne Heimann [00:16:25]:
So we talked about customer centric versus sales and just pipeline centric. We talked about stepping out of those silos and really getting, getting across border, getting across department. And I agree, it's like we have the same issues in systems and processes, right? The left hand doesn't know what the right hand does. We did something great for this department, but it doesn't fit over here. So I love how you are all encompassing. Now coming back around to the data aspect of it. Yes, sales has their. This is the revenue data that we are looking for.
That's the metric we are looking for. You've worked with like 250 plus companies over 25 years. I'm like, you got, you got quite an extensive resource of knowledge and work done. What metric have you found is like most crucial for marketing leaders to track their impact? And what do you think is like the one that's often overlooked? Because again, we are, we are going for customer centric, right? Yes, revenue and income is great, but how do I track, what do I pay attention for in my marketing to know am I on the right path on marketing, customer centric or not?
Laura Patterson [00:17:56]:
I love this question and I'm going to say that it's an easy trap to fall into. I'm going to say there's a trap here. And we're going to come back to marketing in a moment. All right. So I want to be sure that we're again, using the same vocabulary. So measures are a piece of data. Data could be any kind, right? And a measure could be, could be like in everyday life, could be like weight or volume or height. It's a measure.
And we can create all kinds of measures in marketing and in sales. It's almost limitless. Some measures we can control, some measures we can't. I mean, I would do anything to be 5 foot 7, but not going to happen. Okay? Not gonna happen. All right. So not in my control. Probably not a measure I want to spend a lot of time on.
But there may be measures that are not in my control that are happening in my market that I might want to pay attention to so that I can adjust accordingly. And then there's metrics and these are like standards of measures, right? And there could be a metric and for example, conversion rate. Usually a metric has some kind of equation or algorithm. So if you were looking at the conversion rate across the entire customer buying journey at each point in that journey, that would be a measure that we all could be around, right? If we were looking at customer retention rate, that would be another measure that everybody could be focused on. We could look at customer acquisition rate, another measure we could be focused on. And then there are KPIs and KPIs. I like to talk about key performance indicators as a very special metric. And the way I think about them is how much money are you willing to spend to change the number? All right, so customer lifetime value might be a KPI for a company, might be an indicator of KPI for a company, but customer referral rate could also be a KPI for a company.
Because if you're not getting referrals. So these are all examples of customer types of measures and they're way better than a lot of other kinds of measures which are very activity oriented. Like the number of people who do X, Y or Z or the number of people who download this podcast or the number of people who are attending a webinar. Those are interesting measures, but we really want to understand what, how are they moving through the buying journey? That would be a lot better, right, than just those. So we want our measures to create what we call a logic and data chain. So the measures at the bottom that around the things we're doing link up all the way to the top to the outcome we're trying to create, whatever that might be.
Yvonne Heimann [00:20:48]:
Got it. I love that. And yes, I'm happy to report some of those data points is exactly what we are paying attention to. Where it's like, okay, like a click through rate or a conversion rate for me is like, okay, am I telling the right story? Because if I'm telling the right story and I'm hitting the right pain points and my audience feels seen and heard, it's gonna convert. Whatever that conversion if is, if that is clicking through to watch YouTube video is if that is listening to a podcast episode. Or if that is signing up as a client. So I love that we are on the right path. We are on the right path.
And I have to say, going with these, with these data points that are engagement specific, that are converse conversation specific, that's the word I was looking for. That click through rate, that conversion rate or even open rate, they do turn into money too. So indirectly they completely match with the sales numbers. But the language we use to get there and to, to showcase and be there for our clients is completely different. It's not a, hey, do you want to buy this? No. He. I see you, I hear you. I see your struggles.
I know what's going on. I have resources for you to help you. It's a complete different Language, Right. Which is also why I love where you're like always, let's make sure we are talking about the same things because so many words and so many acronyms are being used nowadays and people have different perceptions. So I do really love that how you always clarify and make sure we are all on the same page. Now another thing you are advocating for is planning with the end in mind. I would love to know how does this approach differ from standard traditional marketing planning, but also what results have you seen and how can my audience start planning with the end in mind? What does that mean? How does that look like and what are the results of it?
Laura Patterson [00:23:14]:
Also, a really good question and I noticed you framed that from a marketing perspective. I do want to answer it from a marketing perspective, but this actually applies to anyone. One of the questions I will ask, I'm sharing with you questions I asked because I think you and I agree that in order to be of service, we need to understand where the customer is and where it is they need to go. I start with this question. Do you know what is going to be considered measurable results success for your company in the X time frame? What? Do you know what that is? Not a revenue number, but the actual specific things. What are the three, four, five things your company has to achieve that are measurable in the X time frame in order to declare success? Do you know the answer to that? If the answer is no, then I tell them, do not start any planning until you know that, because that is the end in mind. Let's say they know that. Yes, we know, we know we need to get.
I'll make this number up 200 Net new customers in this segment for this.
New product. And we're going to be looking at product adoption rate and customer acquisition rate. All right, so they've got some measures in mind. And then I will say to them, wonderful. Do you know specifically how in this case, how marketing is going to contribute to that outcome? What is it the company is expecting you to do in order to move the ball down the field? Do you know that? What is your specific role in that? In making that outcome come to fruition? And then lastly, if they don't know that, they need to ask, right? How will. What is it you're expecting from us? How. What is it you want us to do to help the team succeed? And then lastly, how will they know you did it? Because now you're understanding how they're going to measure your contribution. So how will you know? How will you know that you did it? What is it they're going to be looking for? We can set all the measures in place we want.
But here's where the rub is. If we set the measures and they're not the same measures, we will arbitrarily declare success. But the people in the powers that be could arbitrarily declare failure because we are not measuring the same thing, right? So understanding how the powers that be, the people who determine the future for our careers, for our function, for our budgets, our resources, we need to know how they're going to measure success.
Yvonne Heimann [00:26:01]:
And for everybody only listening, not watching on YouTube, you didn't see me completely smile right here. Because listening to you and throughout this whole episode, I've been grinning. I've been grinning because you come back to asking questions which I freaking love. Because yes, we have all the processes, we have all. We know KPIs, we know data points, we know what we are going for, we know what worked for us or what worked for other clients beforehand, right? But without asking questions, we are again just wrongly oriented and just throwing stuff at clients potentially and say, this is what you need to do. This is the data point we are wanting to reach. This is how you win. And it's like right now, getting your feedback specifically was the perfect example of we need to ask more questions and tell less.
I've been seeing so much over the last couple of years where it's like here, this worked for me, this worked for this client. Just rinse and repeat. And it doesn't work like that. If that is clientele just different, having different goals. If that is, as you said, the power powers and be having a different perception what a successful campaign looks like or if it's just I want to run my business differently. So I invite everybody listening and everybody out there that's like, hey, here's the blueprint. Stop with the damn blueprints. Yes, we can pull information out of this.
Yes, we have data on what works. But ask the questions on how this can apply and potentially implement it with the people you work with. It is not a one size fits all.
Laura Patterson [00:28:02]:
Exactly. You know, Yvonne, I just had this.
Conversation not but a couple of days ago with a prospect in a market that we do a lot of work in.
And this person said, I want you to come and we have 50 people, I want you to come and tell us what tactics we need to do to go after new customers. This is not a new company. They've been around for a while, they're very successful. What tactics are working today and what tactics aren't. And I said that doesn't make any sense. Because what tactics are working for somebody may or may not be appropriate tactics for what you want to achieve and things that are not working for somebody might be exactly the right thing for you to use. So before we start talking about tactics, right, which is way down in the conversation in weeds, let's get clarity around what you're trying to accomplish. What strategy are you deploying? Because tactics go to programs that go to strategies.
Right? That's what I mean. Tactics are just bringing a program to life. And programs are just bringing a strategy to life. I don't know what your strategy is, so how can I tell you whether which tactics you should use? So again, to the people listening in your community, be clear about what is your strategies. And a lot of people, they think, for example, SEO is a strategy or PR is a strategy or events are a strategy. These are not strategies, these are tactics. We need to have clarity around what are the strategies. And I have an article on the website, I'll try to send it to you, Yvonne, that talks about different kinds of strategies, but we have slews of articles on strategy.
Because I'm surprised at how few people consider multitude opportunities, multitude of strategies.
And I think a lot of that.
Has to do with, we get comfortable doing what we've been doing, right. So part of it's that we've done it this way. So a new strategy might be a lift. But also I think people get into.
The habit of random acts of doing things, and that's a bad. That's a typical problem.
Yvonne Heimann [00:30:17]:
I would love to for a minute give my audience an example on what's considered a strategy. We talked specifically on what a tactic is. I'm like, SEO is a tactic. Going on podcast is a tactic. How can they understand what's the strategy? So just, just some example on what a strategy could look like. So they have a physical example and an understanding of the word strategy.
Laura Patterson [00:30:49]:
Yeah, I'll give several. All right. So that people can kind of maybe think about it. Let's say you're a relatively, maybe you're a mid market company or maybe a little smaller and you're gonna have a hard time, as we say here in Texas, roping in big game. All right. Because you're not very well known yet for various reasons. Maybe you don't have the resources, maybe you don't have the right people, but you want to get momentum in your market. Well, a strategy for that might be a tipping point strategy, which means that you are going after maybe smaller game, as we would say in Texas.
But there is lots of them. And the more that you can bring in eventually will tip your position in the category that you're going after or the segment that you're going after. So that's an example of a tipping point strategy which is totally different than a 800 pound gorilla or big game strategy or whatever, or lighthouse strategy or whatever you want to call those, which is where you're saying we're just going to go after the 12 largest companies in this space and do whatever we can to acquire them because that will put our name on the map or something like that. So those are very, very different kinds of strategies. A niche strategy is, you know, a very, again, we're going to go after this very specific set of niches. That's what is going to be for us, the right way to grow versus for example, we're going to go after vertical markets, a totally different strategy. Or maybe you were like you're a horizontal market so you're going to have a horizontal strategy and maybe you'll mix that a little bit. But like for example, if you're selling accounting software, you want to be able to sell that to all accountants, right?
And you might organize those accountants into.
Buckets of types of accountants or into size of companies, you might do that.
But you have a horizontal story because you're selling accounting software, right? So those would be some examples. And there are so many.
I mean that's just a tip of the iceberg.
Yvonne Heimann [00:32:57]:
And those were perfect. Those were perfect. I just wanted to make sure our audience today leaves knowing what the difference is between tactic and strategy. Now Laura, tell me you have a ton of resources. Where can people find you and where can they connect with you?
Laura Patterson [00:33:18]:
So if they go to visionedgemarketing.com they.
Can spend their nights, if they're having trouble sleeping, reading slews of free articles. We also have a customer centricity fun assessment. You don't have to give any information away to take a look at it. We have a customer centricity worksheet which is basically 20 questions that they can go through in various components. We have a positioning and messaging free worksheet because in order to be customer centric, you have to have a value prop and messaging that's going to resonate with your customers. And they can always reach out to me at Laura P@Visionedgemarketing.com
Yvonne Heimann [00:33:54]:
And as always, you know, the links are going to be all in the description, easy for you to just click on and go follow Laura. And look at all the amazing resources you have. And Laura, thanks again so much for joining me today. Everybody listening, watching, reading. Make sure you hit that follow and subscribe button so you don't miss another episode of She Is A Leader. I'll see you in the next one. Bye, everybody.
Laura Patterson [00:34:20]:
Thank you. Yvonne.