The Technical Content Benchmark Report 2024

You’ll learn:

- How to make customer relationships personal and meaningful

- Match your solutions with what your customer is trying to accomplish

- Survey customers who chose not to work with you to discover why

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‍Listen For:

‍[02:29] Common misconceptions about sales

[04:24] Building personal relationships with customers

[07:15] Bringing your authentic self to work

[08:42] Two types of leaders

[10:22] Leveraging easily accessible content

[12:44] Measuring CX success

[16:22] “Green scorecard disease”

[17:25] Truly effective self-service

[19:50] Living in an ‘experience economy’

Judi Hand:

I just recently had a customer who's an 18-year customer. So you would think, "Wow, if we've worked together for 18 years, something must be going right." And there probably is a lot going right, but the word they used was stale. The relationship feels stale. How many times have we experienced that just in our lives, that maybe we've started to take relationships for granted? So we talk to our customers all the time. We ask them very pointed questions. What is it that we're doing well? What could we be doing better? And those are the kinds of things that we act on.

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Speaker 2:

Flourish CX, the only show helping CX leaders do one thing: empower their customers. Each episode democratizes best practices while leaving you feeling both inspired and equipped to take action. Let's get to it.

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Shannon Katschilo:

Relationships require hard work. If you neglect them, they break down. But if you nurture them, they can flourish and last a lifetime. And that's about how long you want to keep your customers. Right? I'm Shannon Katschilo, your host for Flourish CX. In this episode, Judi Hand, chief revenue officer at TTEC, shares how to build a solid relationship with your customers to allow room for honest feedback and growth. Judi takes a personal approach, starting by finding common connections and then moving on to understanding what her customer is held accountable for so she can help them accomplish their goals. Judi and I also discuss unique ways of creating simple, straightforward thought leadership content so customers can find your company when looking for solutions to their problems. As you listen, consider how you're reaching out to potential customers and think about what you're doing to build relationships with them long before any transactions actually take place.

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Shannon Katschilo:

Judi, well, welcome to the Flourish podcast. As we get started, we'd love to hear a little bit more about you and your role.

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Judi Hand:

I'm the chief revenue officer for TTEC. And that basically means responsible for growing the top line of the business by having both sales and marketing responsibility across the board. So, TTEC is a global provider of customer experience services for some of the world's largest brands. It's exciting company and exciting role.

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Shannon Katschilo:

What is a common misconception about your role?

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Judi Hand:

I think it's actually not one, it's two, and they go together. The first is, there are still way too many people that when they hear sales, they think that it's about people who will sell you something you don't need. And I would say to you, it's the exact opposite. A really, really great salesperson is matching your needs, your urgent challenges with solutions that can assist you in those challenges. So, that's one. And what goes hand in hand with that is the idea that a great salesperson can sell anything. I so strongly believe that it starts with a really strong value proposition, which is why I'm one of these people, particularly in a business-to-business setting, that believes that sales and marketing go hand in hand, that marketing is such, to a great extent, sales enablement. Marketing really are the guys that have got to make sure that the product is built with the customers' most acute needs in mind. And once we do that, we can line up a wonderful sales process to ensure that we get the right product in the hands of the right customers.

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Shannon Katschilo:

That's wonderful. I could not agree more. Let's shout it out because I think it's an incredible industry made up of really wonderful people that care about the customer. And I think there's a lot that we can do to change the narrative around it. It starts with leaders such as yourself. On a recent podcast, you talked about how the selling process is the first glimpse for customers of what it's like to work with you. Can you walk me through a little bit about that buyer journey and about how you leading the sales organization are looking at adding value and the importance of customer experience through that?

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Judi Hand:

We're a customer experience company. That ought to feel that way from the very first time they even hear our name. Before they ever talk to a person in our company, the information that they can gather about our business before they speak with us should be all about a simple, personalized, highly orchestrated experience. Right? So it starts there and I think that's really, really important. Our average customer tenure is 10 years. I think about this a little bit like a personal relationship. Right? That in the early stages, you're really getting to know each other, and you're getting to know each other to identify that you would be very happy speaking to each other every day for the next 10 years. So you've got to find the common connections. You've got to find where there's affinity, where you've got common beliefs and common objectives and needs.

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Judi Hand:

So we are so involved in really understanding our buyers, and not only what they are responsible for and what they believe they need to accomplish. But as I tell my team, very simply, you need to know what's on their performance review. What are they being held accountable to? What does success look like for them? Your job is to help them get there. That's our job, is to match our solutions with what they need to accomplish, what they need to do. We are representing their brand, and so just by the very nature of what we do on behalf of businesses, they have to feel exceptionally comfortable with us because they're hiring us to be them.

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Shannon Katschilo:

It's wonderful, also as a sales leader, to hear other sales leaders. And I think about the enormity of the decisions when people buy software or buy your services. They're really putting their career on the line. They're taking a risk, and as sellers in the organization, that should not be taken lightly. And I think when you build the right relationships, when you're really focused on the value proposition, and I really loved what you just said, really understand what moves the needle for them and double down on that and make sure you're delivering value for them. For me, one of the greatest positives in my career is seeing my coaches and my champions excel in their career and seeing promotions. One woman in particular took a huge leap of faith on us and we delivered for her. We did whatever we can, and seeing her then move up the organization was truly remarkable. Any similar stories that come to mind for you?

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Judi Hand:

So one of the things I'm very passionate about as a female leader is bringing my authentic self to my job. I think we're one person, we don't have multiple personalities. One of the aspects of my personality is that I am an exceptionally proud parent of two amazing sons. And I think of my team very much in that same way. I am here to be their advocate, to be their lobbyist, to be their mentor. So I'd recently had a gentleman who's worked for me, gosh, for probably about 10 years, just be promoted to the chief revenue officer of the other division of TTEC. And I felt like my son just got the biggest promotion of his life. I mean, it's just heartwarming. It makes our long hours and our hard work matter. Because if it's just about us, that kind of ultimately runs out of steam, but if it's about paying it forward and helping those that are going to come next, it's just so much more rewarding.

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Shannon Katschilo:

And you can hear it in your voice. Right? It's just so authentic. People are humans and they pick up on that. One of my favorite quotes in sales is, "People buy on emotion and backfill with logic." And that's why that really honest, sincere focus on making them successful is just so evident. Do you think it's unusual for CROs such as yourself to be so hands on and focused on improving the customer experience?

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Judi Hand:

I think there's always two types of leaders. Right? There are those that are very actively involved in the business and those that are more preside over the business, consider themselves more responsible for setting strategy and direction and aligning resources accordingly. And I've always considered myself a dirt under the fingernails kind of leader. I will get in the trenches with my team all day long. I will role model. What I mean, I spent a lot of years working through various aspects of the position of chief marketing officer or chief sales officer actually doing the work because I felt so strongly that in order to lead the work, you have to understand how the work gets done. So I think that's just why I lean toward more of the hands-on approach. And yet again, I just believe that in a business-to-business sales setting, which is really quite different, as you know, from selling to consumers, these are business people selling to business people, and we have to just meet each other in a common place. And so that's what the experience is all about.

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Shannon Katschilo:

We often talk about how customer experience starts way before an individual ever contacts your sales team. That's why we're so passionate about delivering great self-service, product information experiences here at Zoomin. So prospects are researching your products, whether you're aware of it or not, what are they going to experience when they get there? And how do you see really self-service and information experiences impacting those early stages of the buyer experience and the brand perception?

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Judi Hand:

Every buyer starts by educating themselves on the options available to them to solve the challenges that are facing them. So our job is to make sure that there is information out there that they can consume that is very simple, very straightforward, very accessible. So we publish a lot of content, and we publish it in a lot of different places where we know our buyers search. Whether that be on our website itself, whether that be through various industry associations that they rely on, we make sure that that content is out there so that they can consume it and then they can very easily reach out to us.

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Judi Hand:

The second thing we do that's really been a game changer is, we use tools from a couple of different companies that really help us understand intent. That this customer not only looks like our best customers and so would be a great prospect, but they are also, through their behavior, suggesting to us that they are now in need of solutions such as ours. And the reason I find that so important is, every one of us, when we have a need, are perfectly happy that somebody is reaching out to us, if you will, in a very simple unobtrusive way and delivering that information to us and making it easy for us to take the next step, which is to follow up with them. So we spend a lot of time and money in marketing, building appropriate thought leadership content around customer experience and making it accessible to our buyers.

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Shannon Katschilo:

What I'm hearing as well, which I think is just so important for the B2B industry is, you're mimicking really great B2C experiences because we know our buyers are consumers. So you're personalizing it, you're knowing about them before they even get to the page, and you're delivering value content. And I think, again, going to where the industry is for B2B, you just have to really accelerate the maturity curve on that. And sounds like you're doing some really amazing work. How are you measuring the success? Outside, of course, of a pipeline generation and sales and all those fun KPIs you and I live in day to day, but how are you measuring customer experience across the organization?

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Judi Hand:

Couple things. One of the beauties of having sales and marketing together is, we share one common metric, call it bookings, which is basically the sales we make in any period of time during the year and the annual contract value of that sale. And my marketing team, from the very top of the funnel all the way through the bottom of the funnel in all of the support that they provide to us, are measured on the ultimate end result. And we tie every step along the way to that ultimate end result. So I think that's really, really keen.

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Judi Hand:

The second thing we do is, we do a lot of customer surveying. So we believe in NPS, net promoter score, and we survey our customers twice a year on net promoter score. We take those results very, very seriously. And if we have any customer that is a detractor, it creates an alert, literally, an alert that goes to the team that manages that customer to really dig in and understand what's going sideways about this relationship.

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Judi Hand:

So the conversation we just had, these are long relationships, and you might think things are going well, but I just recently had a customer who's an 18-year customer. So you would think, "Wow, if we've worked together for 18 years, something must be going right." And there probably is a lot going right, but the word they used was stale. The relationship feels stale. And how many times have we experienced that just in our lives, that maybe we've started to take relationships for granted?

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Judi Hand:

So we talk to our customers all the time. We ask them very pointed questions. Our executives, such as our CEO, myself, our CFO, our chief operating officer are always reaching out to our customers and asking for just candid feedback. What is it that we're doing well? What could we be doing better? And those are the kinds of things that we act on.

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Judi Hand:

The last thing is, I am so keen on win loss. I have an external company that interviews companies that have chosen us and companies that have not chosen us. And we take that very, very seriously. And we actually, if we are allowed to, record the conversation. And there's been times I've played it for our board of directors for a given loss, where we really need to listen to the market. This is the voice of the market. You need to listen to what they're saying about what we could have done to earn their business so that we can make sure that we are always focused on that.

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Shannon Katschilo:

That's so great. You also touched on a couple things there that I think is really applicable for our listeners. A lot of people are surveying and measuring, but what I'm hearing is that you are really leaning into the comments. You're just not listening to the detractors, you're also listening to strong clients and really picking up on cues. And sometimes the best innovation, the best advice, and feedback can actually come from your long-term customers, not from your new hottest, greatest ARR. So that is wonderful to hear. And again, what a great low-hanging fruit initiative, just bringing that feedback to a boardroom, having callbacks done by members of the executive team, because often they're so far removed. And I also just think it's really good for employees to hear that everybody in the organization is truly centered around the customer. Goes a long way for the employee experience.

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Judi Hand:

To your point on measurement, I'll give you a story that happened yesterday. So literally, we have a customer that the scorecard is green. I call it green scorecard disease. "Well, the scorecard is green." "Really?" "Well, let me tell you the conversation I just had with them." That's where you cannot rely on dashboard metrics only. I often refer to that as lifeguard management. Right? You can't sit up in the lifeguard chair and only jump in when somebody's drowning. You've got to be in the water with people and really understand what's happening in the moment. So to me, that was a great example is, "Really, guys, look, your scorecard's green. Let me tell you the conversation I just had."

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Shannon Katschilo:

Oh, that's great. It's good to hear a leader jumping in and pulling back the curtains as well. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you provide really frictionless self-service experiences to your customers and the impact that has not only on customer experience but how you think about that, as well as generating higher brand loyalty, maybe even generating greater sales within those clients. Love to hear a little bit more about your investments and overall strategy with self-service.

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Judi Hand:

If you think about our business, that's 40 years old this year, we started as a business where when you needed to reach out to a brand for support, you reached out to a person. And that was the right answer for many, many, many years. It's what people wanted. It's what was expected. It's what drove satisfaction. Fast forward for the last 10 years, and if we don't have to deal with an 800 number, and God forbid, go through an IVR, which I heard a stat that I loved, which is something like, 38% of people would rather clean a toilet than deal with an IVR. So I think that's a great example. But people's preference is to solve it themselves. So we have an entirely separate division that we work with every single day with our clients that build those technologies, build those self-service engines, build that automation. Because if you can self-service, as a customer, that is your desire and your expectation but it has to work.

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Judi Hand:

You can't feel like, "Well, I have a frequently asked questions button on my website, so I am offering self-service," or, "I have a couple of service bots that I've created, and so I'm offering self-service." You have to make sure you're measuring, is that solving the customer's question challenge problem, something we call first call resolution? Because if it's not, then don't fool yourself that that self-service is working. And make sure there's always an escape hatch. That is one of the things we are very focused on is, if the customer doesn't feel as though through self-service, they've gotten their answer, make it exceptionally easy. In fact, proactively offer them an escalated channel, offer them an expert to help them through whatever their issue is. Don't just wait for them to call you back or to chat with you or to message you or what have you and say, "Hey, my problem persists. My question persists. I did not get this resolved."

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Shannon Katschilo:

What a great takeaway. I think we can really ensure that everybody in the organization understands how to appropriately escalate, how to do it in a short amount of time. Because again, it is the customer expectation, and to be ready and available to do that is so key. I'd also love to understand a little bit more, and you're on the C-suite, what should a CEO or even COO know about the complexity of the customer experience in sales that they don't realize, or maybe even what everybody is afraid to tell them? And how do you in your daily role really continue to enhance and build awareness around the importance of it?

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Judi Hand:

Today, our economy is really what we call the experience economy. People are buying pure products any longer they're buying experiences. One of the best examples I like to use is, when I was a teenager, I had a Schwinn bike. That was a product. I had no need to have a relationship with Schwinn, the manufacturer of that bike. Today, it's the Peloton as a service. And I have to have conversations with Peloton fairly routinely because I may be using that service every day. It's a subscription-based model, right? So every time I pay for that subscription on a monthly basis, I think in my own head, am I getting the value out of that? So you have to constantly be delivering that. We are living in the experience economy, and what we tell our senior executive clients is, do you know what that experience really feels like from the customer's point of view?

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Judi Hand:

So we very much focus on journeys. What's the journey that your customers go through? And they go through many different journeys with a brand, from trying to decide if I'm going to do business with that brand to then onboarding with that brand, to then consuming whatever services that I've bought from that brand, potentially renewing what that brand. There's lots of different journeys through the relationship. And do you, C-suite, really understand what that feels like from the customer's point of view? And do you also understand that different customers have different experience expectations? So one size does not fit all. What a certain generation may think is a perfect experience, another generation doesn't. So you have to build your experiences based upon your buyer personas and you have to also build them based upon what is the very best journey in the eyes of the customer.

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Judi Hand:

Sometimes that should really help you determine what communication path you want your customers to go down. So what we find is, we call them intents. What's the intent that you have when you're reaching out to a brand? And there are certain intents that work perfectly for self-service. There's other intents that absolutely cut through all of that and go directly to a person because this is a very emotional, very complex, very hairy issue that you're going to need assistance because that person's going to have to take it upon themselves to maybe work through the backend of an entire organization to solve your problem. You, CEO, should know that. You should know what those intents are, what those journeys are, who those buyer personas are. Your customer experience strategy should be mapped against those. It's not a one size fits all.

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Shannon Katschilo:

Judi, I feel like I could talk to you all day genuinely about this. And it's, again, really refreshing and exciting to hear other sales leaders with such a passion. And I think that there's just great momentum in the space and how we think. And again, I think sales and customer experience are just really two sides of the same coin. Anything that you'd like to share with us before we close that maybe we didn't get to?

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Judi Hand:

I think that every salesperson should bring value to every conversation that they have with their customers. It's like when you hear from Judi, you're like, "Oh, Judi, I'd love to talk to you. Here's what's really on my mind. Here's what's really got me challenged." That's a great relationship and that's what I really try to equip my team to be able to do so that these are long, long term relationships that we have with our customers.

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Shannon Katschilo:

Thank you for listening to this episode of Flourish CX. To learn more head over to zoominsoftware.com/podcast and follow along wherever you get your audio.

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