(dramatic music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful Palo Alto studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. Another great conversation today, this one's especially interesting to me, we've got Tiffani Bova who's the Global Growth and Innovation Evangelist of Salesforce. Just written a book, great book by the way, Growth IQ, I guess it's coming out later in August of 2018. But Tiffani, I want to talk a little bit about something that seems near and dear to your heart, the notion of customer engagement and how that gets turned into business strategy. So, let's start there. What is, in your two and half years at Saleforce, what have you learned about customer engagement and how actionable is it, really? >> Well, you know, Peter, it's a great question 'cause I'd say this, you know, I thought I knew the answer to that question when I stated two and a half years ago and I've had the wonderful pleasure of spending time with customers of ours around the world and now I have a different perspective on what that is. You know, Clayton Christensen wrote that new book, Competing Against Luck and it was all about, sort of, the job that you have to do, right? You're going to go from point A to point B, are you going to catch a taxi or you going to catch an Uber. And what makes the difference if the job is the same, regardless of what you're doing. In my mind, right, it's the experience or the engagement that that particular driver or brand has with the customer that is riding in the back of the car, satisfying the need for the job that needed to be done. And when I started to shift my thinking around it's really this experience layer and this engagement layer of how easy is it, how friction, you could apply it to all kinds of industries now, you know. Whether it's meal delivery, or buying a book or buy, you know, software from someone like Salesforce or consulting or watching this show. It used to be you had to go and watch it live or you'd have to watch it on television, now we have very different ways and means in which you can be engaged. So that has been super exciting to me to see it live and in person as brands are really focusing on this importance of the way in which they engage with, connect with and inspire customers to do things with them as their brand of choice. >> So, as I said, Tiffani, I like the book and there is three or points that really want to draw out. I want to start with the first one though. >> Okay. >> Let's go back to this notion of engagement. >> Yes. >> You make the observation in the book and I also have some, a background, thinking about customer engagement, customer experience but you make a great point in the book that your brand is the promise that you're make to the marketplace. Customer experience is the customer side of the engagement. >> Right. >> It seems as though if there's a significant miss-match between those two, that's the first indication you've got a problem. If your brand promise and what is being experienced are not aligned, that says something, have I got that right? >> Absolutely and what's fascinating about that is many brands feel like they're totally aligned and then in mass, you know, research from all kinds of people whether it's McKenzie or Bain or Gartner or Forester or anybody else, you're seeing this disconnection where the brand thinks it's great and the customer's going, it's not that great. The gap between those two things, unfortunately, even with all the advancements with technology, I feel like it's getting wider, right? Because their still sort of, brands are still sort pushing out what they think is interesting and engaging and customers are going, it's kind of not so much. And so, this really a way and I really dug into it in Growth IQ of how brands can figure out, how do I get closer to that by starting with the customer and working their way back in. I mean, it's a long discussed topic of outside in versus inside out, it's nothing new there but now we have this advancements of technology that actually allow us to know what that outside in is telling us at scale, without having to throw people at the problem. >> Yeah, through data collection and other types of things. >> Absolutely. >> But it all starts with that impedance miss-match. >> Yes. >> And as you said, if businesses don't accept that they have a problem they're not going to change. But that is a measurable, actionable thing. >> Right. >> So, if nothing else, if nobody reads anything else out of the book, just that simple idea that it's not MPV, it's not, you know, other types of measures, your Net Promoter Score or other types of measures but it's, basically, is there that disconnect. So the second thing is is that you've observed how it can be made actionable. Now, you've come up with 10, a recipe, or let's call them 10 ingredients of different ways of thinking about what you might be able to do from a growth standpoint. Now, rather than going through all of them, let's just say that they're there but the thing that's interesting is you've come up with a general framework for how you can imagine putting those things together. You call it context combination sequence, what does that mean? >> It, I think it's, I, when I decided to embark on this journey of writing this book I said, you know, what do I feel has been missing, or what did I notice as a pattern as I was having conversations since I was traveling around and talking to customers. And it wasn't the decision that they make of how they were going to grow that was interesting, it was actually the fact that it was rarely in isolation. It was never a single answer to a very complex problem, it was a combination of a number of things. So, if you're going to launch a new product, like that's going to be your growth strategy, well, are you going to launch it yourself? Are you going to do it with partners? Are you going to launch it direct to consumer online or you going to go into retail? You have to then combine the fact that you want to launch a new product with other things to help you grow. Or if you you're going to say I want to reduce turn, it's not just, well, I'm going to lower a price because that's going to be a reason for people to stay, it's, well wait a second, are the platforms easy to use? Can people open a ticket easily? It's always in combination. >> Do I have visibility into whom I churn? >> And to whom I churn, right? But the first place people fail to start, let's to back to your original question of this gap between what customers expect and what businesses are doing is the context in the market has significantly shifted over the last decade. You could say, well obvious technology advancements but I think far more disruptive than technology is actually the customers themselves demanding more from brands. I want you to be better to the environment. I want you to be better socially. I want you to give me more value for what I'm spending. I want it as a service not as a product. I want it in a monthly bill not a one-time bill. I want to pay usage. Whatever they're saying, the customer has changed the context of the market. And I think that's one of the big triggers in this, so you start with context, what's going on, next is what are you going to combine those efforts with. And then the third thing and equally import is sequence. The order in which you do things actually has implications to the likelihood of success of whatever it is you're doing. If you're going to launch into a new market with a new product, and you don't have the infrastructure for distribution or selling or service in place before you launch the product, probably the wrong order. >> Right. >> Right and so if you need to set up the partnerships and the distribution and support and sales and marketing, support within region or translate things to language or do the things that you need to do to marketing materials or websites before you get there because if you launch, the first impression is gone if it's not a good experience for the customer. >> Yeah, you only have one time to make a first impression. >> You only have one time and it doesn't need to be perfect, but you cannot be just completely off the mark because getting them to come back is more expensive than it would of been had you just taken a pause, gotten it right and launched at the appropriate time. >> And that notion of context is also especially important because you identify something you call timing which is related to sequence in the fact that you have to be very honest about what you can and cannot effect. There are some things you may want to sequencing, you may want to fall the sequence. >> Right. >> But if the market isn't going to respond favorably, tell us a little bit about timing and how context shapes and resets prioritization as it changes as well. >> Yeah so, if you think of somebody like a Netflix, if Netflix had started with streaming and not with DVD mail, you know, in the United States at least, not everybody had bandwidth, it was too expensive, it was in very specific neighborhoods and as bandwidth started to make its way into the households and the cost started to decline, then they could say, well, wait a second, is this the best way to do it or could we potentially stream it and start doing OTT types of services? But they had to wait for the technology as well as the customer to catch up with what was possible. So, had they not done mail and started with streaming, maybe they couldn't of held on long enough. And so, mail was a great way to do, I'm going to capture these customers, I'm going to penetrate this base, get them to order more movies and do more things with me. Now I'm going to introduce streaming. Now I have this base of customers which now may want to transition to a new kind of delivery or experience that they want to have with us. And you might be surprised that they still have hundreds of thousands of mail customer including my mom, she still gets DVDs in the mail. And it's a huge profit engine for them, actually allows them to reinvest in the business to expand the streaming services other places in the world which may never get mail service, right. But in the beachhead of it and just let the customers churn out, never getting rid of it, not marketing it but not getting rid of it. So, had those timings been offered different, they may not have been as successful. So, it really has implications to think about what is the customer looking for, what is the temperature socially, what can technology help me deliver? Putting those things together and going, knowing what I know, I don't need it to be perfect but I'm willing to test it and fail and iterate and keep going as long as I keep that context of the market in mind and then the customer, you know, as sort of my true north of making sure that I'm aligning those things again, like we were talking about. >> So let me see if I can summarize that, so you got to get the context, which is-- >> Yes. >> What's really in the marketplace, customer, regulatory, competitor, all those other thing we think about. >> All those things. >> You think about the combination of recipes or combination of responses and then how you're going to sequence them out. Then that sequencing decision then goes back and says and what do I need to redefine about my understanding of context. >> That's right, that's right. >> So I got that right? >> You've got that right and I would tell you that-- >> So your avoiding boiling the ocean. >> Yeah, and that's what always, sort of, when I was trying to figure out what did I want to say in this book. I did not want it to be a boil of the ocean. I picked 10 paths to growth, none of which I think will be a surprise to anybody. It's a modernization on what Ansoff had done around the Ansoff four, there's that. There are things that now we have at our disposal which we didn't have at our disposal in 1957 when Ansoff came out. >> Yeah. >> I mean, so, you have to obviously introduce new things. So like, just using something like socially conscious enterprise was not something we were talking about 10 years ago. >> Right. >> But it's being used as a growth path now. And so, I wanted to try to give 10 very distinct growth paths so that people didn't feel overwhelmed by the hundreds of choices they could make. So if I could get it to something that was digestible and then say now, how do I put those things together. So I made natural associations between paths so that people would say, oh, if I'm going to do product and customer diversification, I might need to do partnerships. If I have a churn problem, I may need to optimize sales. Those two things fit together, right? If I'm going to, customer experience is at the foundation of everything. >> Right. >> Right, and so I tried to tell the story that people could say, oh, we're already on this path, should be stay on this path? Is it the right path? Should we be moving? Am I doing everything I could be doing to make this path be more effective? And that's what I was hoping to get out this is that I don't want people to think this is something completely flip the chessboard over and start from scratch. >> Right. >> I want you to pivot ever so slowly and make adjustments in real time so that you're not having to do, this is kind of an evolutionary versus revolutionary kind of transformation. >> Yeah, the strategies that seem to work today, or feature three things and kind of comes from Cluetrain Manifesto, agile, the empirical, they're based on data, they're optimistic, they identify what really can be done and their irritative, they take smaller steps when they do that. >> Yes. >> So, let me return back to kind of the notion of engagement, just for a second. >> Sure. >> One of the reasons why this book has so much prescriptive power is because there is a dramatic shift globally in market power. It used to be the sellers had the market power and therefore the information at your disposal that you used to make a decision largely came from the sellers and now, you're able to move into communities where buyers can come together and identify themselves in each other and use that source of information to help you make decisions. Very, very significant and profound shift and that's in many respects what's driving experience. Historically though, we've talked about sales and marketing alignment. (Tiffani laughing) About how we got to get the right message out, we got to enable sales in the right way. But customers spend most of their time with a brand in the form of a product or service which suggests that he whole notion of customer service and sustaining alignment between expectations and actuality in the customer service function becomes especially important. Have I got that right? >> You nailed it, I mean, I would say also you know, and I'm actually a practitioner before I was at Gartner, so I actually ran a division of Gateway computers, I ran sales and marketing for them. Before that I worked in web hosting company, we were the largest web hoster in the United States, we were actually four times the size of Rackspace. I was the beta client for ALOQUA, I was the beta client for Constant Contact. I was socially selling in 2000. Our shared property is web.com, if you watch golf. And so I was super early, so I'm actually a sales, I sort of say I'm a recovering seller, I bleed sales blood. (Peter laughing) And so when I was running both sales and marketing, I could argue with myself. But when I was just selling, you know, I understand this, you know, marketing giving us leads, sales not doing something with it. Then when I had customer service, you know, those three things together, I think today, is where companies really miss an opportunity. That just getting new customers in the door and it's so much more expensive to recruit new customers and to pay to get them versus just mining the gold you've already got. So, that is something that I'd say over the last two and a half years now that I'm here and I see it at scale that I will have conversations with CMOs and heads of sales and then the head of customer service is not in the room or it's just marketing and sales. So the same way marketing enables sales, they need to enable customer service. >> And, very importantly, the information that is being generated out of customer service-- >> Absolutely. >> Need to enable sales and marketing. >> Absolutely-- >> And in products. >> So I would tell you that in my opinion, the disconnection between what customers expect and businesses are doing actually is a manifestation of the unintentional consequence of the disconnection of teams because of the disconnection of metrics. Sales is very much, like how much did you sell? I mean, I'm over simplifying but how much did you sell. Marketing, how many leads did you, good or bad, how many leads? Customer service, how quickly did you get someone off the phone and how many calls did, tickets did you close today? Those three things pull those three groups in very different directions. So, something like a Net Promoter Score or churn or lifetime values, something can thread those three groups together in a metric so that people know that they're all in this together even though they play different roles. And so, I think the fact that people try to own customer experience worries me because I think the whole company has to be very focused on... >> It's a CEO job. >> But then it's a cultural shift, right? >> Absolutely. >> It's about culture, it's about this customer wants to have me help their problem but I have to get off the phone in two minutes because that's my quota and so do I get off the phone in two minutes or do I help my customer? >> Okay, let me make one quick comment and I'm going to ask you one last question. >> Yeah. >> And the quick comment I'll make is very prominent CEO of a very, very large computing company once said to me, I asked this person, 'cause I thought that they had won large because of marketing. And I said, so, tell me about he role of marketing within your company. And this person said to me, oh, marketing is what I put between engineering and sales so they don't kill each other. (Tiffani laughing) And I think that needs, obviously that orientation needs to change. But the last thing I wanted to talk about is one of the patterns you noted is disruption or disruptive-- >> Yes. >> I don't remember exactly what you called it but it boiled down, it could mean a lot of things, but you specifically focused on and you've already mentioned it, social good. >> Yep. >> As part of a strategy, give us a, you know 30 second, 44 second, why is social good becoming a viable strategy or viable pattern, one of the combinations that's working today? >> Well, I'd say, Salesforce was founded on the 1-1-1 model, which was very much about sort of this doing well by doing good, or doing good by doing good. But I would say this that even if you've watched television commercials over the last year, especially since Super Bowl last year, you'll see brands actually making statements about how they do well for the environment, how they're giving back, how they're hiring veterans, how they're doing things for... You know, Starbucks just announced they're going to- >> How they're willing to fly immigrant children home if they need to. >> Yeah, Starbucks is not doing a Starbucks in DC that will be signing so for hearing impaired. So you see people really making pivots and actually using that as I'm trying to connect with my constituency and my customer base in a new and different way. I love the fact that social consciousness is now getting into Unilever and getting into, you know the 1-1-1 model spread across 3,000 companies now. Or the Tom's model, one for one, buy a shoe, a shoe gets donated. You see it happening with a lot of start ups now where they're trying to start the company that way. Now, if you have a company that didn't start that way, there's not reason why you can't start to find a place where you can inject it going forward. But I'm super excited about that. >> Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Innovation Evangelist Salesforce, talking about the book Growth IQ. Again, great book. >> Thank you. >> Very prescriptive and I mean, I generally hate business books, lot of case studies. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, peter, it's been a pleasure. >> Absolutely, so once again, thanks for participating in our CUBE Conversation and until the next one, we'll see you soon. (dramatic music)