Tiffani Bova - Global Growth & Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce | The Human Edge in a Digital World

How do you actually gauge whether or not a company does have an optimized EX? We did a very small US-only based project. We took publicly available information. What we found was Tiffany Bova. She recently wrote the book, Growth IQ. Get smarter about the choices that will make or break your business. She is also a growth expert at Salesforce and has been giving keynote speeches to businesses. Close to customer-centric company on the planet. Do you know who it is? There is this timeline between proving ROI when it comes to the soft skills of humans that actually have the greatest impact on that connection during that moment that matters when an employee touches a customer. That moment happens. That's... I want to know what good EX looks like at different levels. It is a great question because I think this is where... What was the turnaround story from Best Buy? Walk me through what they did. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. Today, I just wanted to remind you that one of my favorite events of the year is coming up. I'm talking about HubSpot's annual inbound conference in Boston. I think you'll love it if you've never gone before. Mark your calendars September 5th through the 8th, 2023. Catch talks from some of the most incredible speakers. They have Reese Witherspoon, Derek Geter, Andrew Suberman, and there's so much more. They have multiple stages. They have tons of industry experts and tracks from sales strategy to AI to innovation. You always walk away with practical tips that you can put into action right away. Plus, you're always going to connect with other leaders. I'm going to be there. A lot of people in the HubSpot podcast network are going to be there. It's one of the most exciting events featuring leaders from some of the most innovative companies in the world this year is going to be unforgettable. Tickets are selling out fast, head over to inbound.com to get yours today. Today, my guest is Tiffany Bova, a global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce and a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Growth IQ. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue producing divisions that businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500. As a research fellow, I've gotten her cutting edge insights, health, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, HP, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon, and other prominent companies expand their market share and grow the revenue. She's worked with thousands. She's been named one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by thinkers 50 twice. She is also the host of the podcast. What's next? All right, well, I would say that it was probably I might have been 22 years old-ish. I was in that range. And at the time, I was working for a family friend in Hawaii, which is where I'm from. I was actually on the island of Maui and we were opening up an indoor video arcade. So there was a point in time where videos were not on your smartphones. They were actually like at an arcade where people had to go to the arcade. And we were opening up this store. It was probably 16 or 17,000 square feet. I mean, it was a massive sort of store. It had a restaurant, games, you know, gave away teddy bears. It had sort of very much this indoor carnival feel. And so the top of the roof of it was replicated kind of a big top tent in a carnival if you've ever seen one, right? Lots of light bulbs and really that feeling like, wow, I've walked into something super special. So we duplicated that in doors to sort of give that same feel. So the woman who was the owner of the business who really mentored me very early in my sort of development into business walks in, you know, and it's sort of a couple hours before the opening. And she's kind of going down the line and saying hello to everybody. And she gets to me, I'm last in this line of employees. And she literally looks at me and says nothing and points up. So in my head, I'm like, oh, I'm number one. You know, look up. Like, you know, I didn't know what sort of what the communication was really about. And so she kind of, you know, this is in a split second, right? So she walks away and my eyes sort of gaze up. And in this thousands of light bulbs in this big top tent, we had replicated in doors. One light bulb was out just one. And that's what she was pointing to. So, you know, we got this place ready, right? Thousands of light bulbs, all the games, the teddy bears, it was clean. Like, everything was humming along, but one light bulb was out. And so that one lesson, like I've told this story probably a hundred times, right? Was all about creating these experiences and how the little things matter. And so, you know, when I advise companies and, you know, I always sort of reflect in my mind, what is that one thing I could point out to them that they may be just completely overlooking? Because it's kind of so basic, like that one light bulb, right? But he has implications to what what customers think about what you think about your own organization, right? If you're not willing to care about those things, then your employees aren't willing to care about those things. And in turn, your customers feel that, you know, you don't care enough to do them. I love that. I love that story. And I think it's actually so impactful because I think that every company had a much larger scale than this one particular smaller setup does have those light bulbs that are out. That's always the case. And I was actually watching, you know, to prep for this, I was watching some of your past talks. I think you were doing one on the growth IQ, which was your first book. And you were saying, like, all the parameters for growth and you showed a chart are these things. And like, it was like the most basic stuff. Yes. Like, kind of, it was like the most basic things that a company obviously knows to focus on. But they don't or there's misalignment or they have, they've missed something or there's like stuff that's fallen through the cracks. So I'm super curious as to, you know, your first, your first book was, your first book wasn't completely focused just on EX and CX. So I think it was more on the customer experience if I'm not mistaken. And then the second book that you're actually putting out is more on the employee experience. And I think there's a conversation between the two. But how, how, what do customer actually, what do companies miss? What do companies miss? And through your experience, your life cycle, because even as you wrote your first book, you were looking at what companies miss in a certain perspective. But that's evolved, obviously, which is why this is the second focus on the second book. Yeah, it's a great question because this is a little bit of a mechopal, right? I mean, a mechopal. Yeah. I mean, ultimately those 10 paths to growth to your point, Scott, were nothing earth shattering and new. That nine first paths were like, you know, sell more to your existing customers, launch a new product, go into new markets. I mean, none of that stuff. It was really a spin on the Ansoff Matrix, which is the sort of two by two that really helped companies from a strategic standpoint. But what I did was I took those tried and true strategies for growth. And I modernized them using social mobile cloud, big data, AI, you know, all the tools that we now have at our disposal were, you know, not even a glimmer, you know, in the 60s when the Ansoff Matrix was developed. Yet the strategy of selling more to your existing customers, a product you already have is everybody still does it and then sell new products to the customers you have. Everybody still does it, right? But rethinking that was what was so important and kind of getting back to the basics and understanding the connection between the decisions that you make when it comes to growth. So that was kind of the foundation of growth. But the very first growth path was customers. I called customer experience kind of your true north. Everything should be revolving around what your customers want, what they need from you, and still a true statement. But what I missed in that in any depth in the entire book was that the keepers of your brand promises, best products, best customer service, you know, best offices, you know, best field service technicians, whatever it might be, those brand promises are delivered by your employees. So if your employees are not happy, engaged, committed, enabled, trained, all the things I sort of talk about in the new book experience mindset, you know, it will be a miss because the greatest strategies are delivered by people. And when things, you know, push comes to shove your Excel spreadsheet or your, you know, Salesforce report, whatever it might be, does not come run to your aid. Like it's the people of the organization that do right? So if the, if there is a disconnect between what employees need in order to develop those great products, deliver those great experiences, you know, go that extra mile for the customer, then it's all for not. So it was really a miss for me to not include that as one of the quote unquote growth paths. But, you know, low and behold, two years later, I went down a path of doing a lot of new research and it led me to the fact that this connection is so tight that there's, it's just almost not possible to deliver great CX without having great EX. You know, you worked with some of the biggest companies in the world. I'm going to name names and like they're the names that every, like, so Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hula Packard, IBM, Oracle, AT&T, Dell, and Amazon. Those are the top of the top. You can't, you can't really find, maybe you can if you look hard enough, but that's pretty much on the list of every large organization of where you should go to to look for who's doing business properly and whatnot. Now, if you ask all the leaders at those companies, they're going to say that they focus on their employees. They're all, they're all going to say, of course, yes, employees are, you know, the most important part of our business. It seems like such a, but are they really, are the biggest companies in the world actually focusing on their employees at the level at which you think is required to actually deliver the most impeccable CX? Because I would even say that you look at the companies that were disrupted and like the classic example is like Blockbuster. I'm sure Blockbuster thought they took care of their employees, but there was a miss, there was a miss there. And then there was a miss all too, you know, a lack of, a lack of understanding of how the market was shifting and a lack of understanding of how their model was being disrupted. And maybe that's because there wasn't enough voicing of this problem internally with the employees in terms of product or how they saw the company moving. I don't know, but how do you actually gauge whether or not a company does have an optimized EX because they're all going to, they're all going to say it till they're not, they're all going to say it till they're disrupted, right? Yeah, so what happened was I was standing on stage in Canada a number of years back. And I said that I didn't think it was a coincidence that Salesforce was one of the best places to work around the globe. You know, for not number one, we're sort of in the top five ish, right? Pretty pretty much globally. We're one of the most innovative companies in the world. And we're the fastest growing enterprise software company in the cloud, specifically for sure. Now, those are not sort of accolades that Salesforce stood up when Dan said, these are the things we are. This is really sort of what the market has, you know, given us from awards and things like that. So I didn't think it was a coincidence. So then I said, look, I'm not the first one to say it. Herb Kelleher, you know, the former CEO and founder of Southwest Airlines was like, well, take care of our employees. They take care of our customers. If we do that, right, it takes care of our shareholders and it comes back and we can take care of our employees, right? And it's sort of this flywheel effect. Richard Branson has said it, right? Take care of our customers. They take care of our employees. We do that. We can grow. Nothing new there. Going back to almost what we were just talking about with growth IQ. But I hadn't seen proof. I hadn't seen proof sort of from growth rates on those companies that do those two things really well. How much faster they grow than the rest of the market. So we did a very sort of small US only based project Salesforce and Forbes insight. And we took publicly available information of like net promoter scores and glass door ratings and customer satisfaction scores and churn rates and then revenue and revenue growth, right? We took, it had to be publicly traded for obvious reasons because we just wanted to go out and try to prove this out. And sure enough, what we found was that companies that did employee experience well saw a lift in KPIs on customer experience. Okay. When we looked at customer experience, we saw a lift in KPIs for employee experience, right? So if you have happier customers, right? They're not yelling at your employees. Your employees don't feel like eight hours a day. They just get yelled at on their customer service line, right? Or something like that. But when both of those things happened, one of them was sort of a 1.3 times growth rate. One was a 1.4 times growth rate. When you got those two things right, it was a 1.8 times growth rate. So for a billion dollar brand, it's a 40 million dollar impact. So we knew we were on to something. Now, if you do E strong, you still get a good growth rate. If you do C strong, you still get a good growth rate. So I'm not saying you can't get growth if you're not doing both well. But what I'm saying is you can get a faster multiplier, if you will, a greater multiplier of growth, rather, if you do both right. So back to the original front start of that question you had, yes, executives intuitively understand this. And I would say that most through the second body of research we did said, if it's so obvious, why isn't everybody else doing it? It's really obvious. Tiffany, this isn't anything new. I'm like, I know. However, tell me your own employee experience. So many executives will say, of course, employees are super important to us. I care about my people. I care about my employees. And through the research, it showed that that's what they would say. But in the same breath, they would come back and say, however, we ask our employees to default to the customer above all else. So this default of, I am interested in the success of my employees. But we're always going to say that our customers are a true north. We're a customer centric company. It's customer first sort of whatever route, you know, sort of mantra you want to have internally. And I'll give you sort of one example. You know, the most customer centric company on the planet. That was their mantra. Who was it? Do you know who it is? I don't know. Amazon Amazon. Okay. So that was their statement. We want to be the most sort of customer centric company on the planet. And did they grow absolutely? Like did they knock out industries? Absolutely. Do they create entire new categories? Absolutely. Fair, right? But then what happened? The pandemic hit and who wasn't happy anymore? Employees. And the second that happened, it was really right when Jeff Bezos was stepping down as CEO, it sort of was added that we want to be the greatest employer on the planet. So now you have this balance, right? If we're going to do this, we have to do that. And when employees that sort of unhappiness, if you will, with employees really showed itself during COVID, right? Great resignation, quiet quitting unionization. Even Amazon in particular, a lot of negative stories about how they created their own. And now they want to unionize, right? And they're not alone. So you have Starbucks really well known and held up as a very strong customer company, right? I mean, no complaints. Really from customers. But then what happened? Employees started to get unhappy. Then what happens? Then they want to unionize. And so I can say that it's not a bad thing to be customer centric. Obviously, I've been touting that one statement of being customer centric for, you know, almost 18 years. So I would say that that is a good thing. However, it sort of starts and stops with. You have to make sure that the employees are equally engaged in having a good experience. And you actually touched on a point there and you didn't go into it. So I'm actually, I'd like you to go into it. When you ask the question, who owns the employee experience in an organization? So I want, I want to break it down for somebody who's a smaller company as well, a CEO that's just struggling to, you know, get to make it a little bit more than a million because at that point, it's just like a, a glorified job. But say they're trying to get the 10 million dollars and they have a small team, a little bit outsourced, a little bit internal. They have some full time, you know, double W two, W two hires all the way through to and maybe just walk through the different levels of what, you know, EX looks like all the way through to Fortune 500, Fortune 100, who owns the customer experience throughout that journey as the company evolves. And then I'll actually, I will ask you a two-part question, even though I shouldn't, but I will, I want to know what good EX looks like at different levels. Yeah, it is a great question, right? Because I think this is where I've tried to work pretty hard in writing the book to make sure that I wasn't advocating for a new C suite role. So many years ago, I was part of the team prior to joining Salesforce. I was a research fellow at Gartner. And I was part of the team that made the prediction that the chief marketing officer would spend more on IT than the chief information officer. And when we said that, it was sort of 2008-ish, everyone thought we were crazy, but low and behold, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP all went out and bought companies that were in that marketing technology stack to get a hold of those budgets that the CIO may no longer be in control of. And if the marketing chief marketing officer was going to become the buyer, how do they create sort of that narrative to attract that new buyer to that technology that they now have? And it was really also about trying to get the CMO at the seat of the executive table, not sort of reporting under the COO or maybe under someone else in the organization, but really getting them a seat on the table because we believed that experience was going to become that new battleground between brands, especially when it is highly commoditized, transactional, like what makes it different. It's going to either have to be a better experience or a better designed and developed product. And so the product development may be too expensive and out of reach for some. So if I can make sure my people are better trained and my customers have a better experience, I could win there. Okay, so in this scenario, in this case, rather for the experience mindset, I did not want to advocate that I need a chief employee experience officer because especially for small companies, a CEO is playing eight roles. Like he's the CEO, CMO, CRO, CHRO, like he's got of everybody or he or she is everybody. So what I want to have happen regardless of size organization is when a company makes a decision to reduce the effort for a customer in order to increase the experience for that customer. So, you know, in 2000, we were arguing about making sure that you could, it's three clicks to get to the cart to buy online. In 2000, we were arguing for three clicks to buy. It's been 23 years and still I show up at sites and it's like six clicks. Just take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode, HubSpot. Now, HubSpot and the HubSpot podcast network have incredible podcasts. You have to listen to like entrepreneurs on fire hosted by John Lee Dumas. He's been in the podcast game for forever. He gives you insightful interviews. Now, imagine this. You're getting first hand experience from successful entrepreneurs like Kevin Lannister, who knows a thing or two about navigating the chaos and rapidly changing industries. He runs the fastest growing IT company in the world or Tyler Wagner, who believes in the power of your story to scale your business online or how about learning from Tom Antian's old, but gold insights on transforming hobbies, streams of passive income. If you are an entrepreneur, you need to listen to entrepreneurs on fire hosted by John Lee Dumas, brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcast. Get out. So. Yeah, no, so yeah, yeah, okay, okay. So, yeah, yeah, just let's pick that up right. So back then in 2000, when we were reducing the amount of clicks for the customer to buy in the background, the effort for the employee actually went up because it back then it wasn't automated. Like, we didn't have the power of these one-click shopping carts and payment with things like PayPal or Venmo or Apple Pay or whatever it might be. Ultimately, we didn't have those things. So we had to kind of manually get things done. So what do we do? Decreased effort for a customer, increased experience, unintended consequence, increased effort for employee, decreased experience for employee. And over the last 20, 20 years or so, that has gotten even further out of balance where we've so overpivoted to customer, we've kind of left employee behind. So if you are a small business entrepreneur, medium, business, large business and you are making any decisions that impact customer, I just want you to pause for a second and say, okay, hold on. I think this is the right thing to do to do for the customer. What is the implications to the employee? And I don't care what size you are, right? Or I don't care what role you're in. If you're going to change a process, if you're going to add a new application in the environment, if you're going to pick a new vendor and it's really good for the customer, how good is it for the employee? And that's why I called it experience mindset because I need you to shift your mindset away from exclusively focusing on customer and giving a little bit of pause to make sure you're not negatively impacting employee. Will it be 50-50? Probably not. But if I can get you to just stop and say, hold on, what's the implication to the employee? We change this. Have we trained them? Did we change the processes? Have we given them five more things to do a day versus reducing things? If I can get you to do that, regardless of size, then it's been a success. And that also, so when you add on a new process, you work with a new vendor, that could also mean hiring somebody to support. So that's not always, so you can optimize for customer experience as long as you basically scale out or optimize internal processes so that your employee does not suffer that much. Considerably, you have to make sure that their day-to-day does not vary is basically what you're saying. That's the goal. If they're maxed out, that's the goal. So they're maxed out capacity. Of course, in some cases, it's going to be you can actually increase their workload slightly because maybe they do have a fair amount of free time and they're not really optimized as an individual, but that's okay. But if they are optimized as an individual, then you're either hiring someone else out to support them or you're upskilling them or there's something that you're doing within your organization that basically let this new process land softly on the people that are actually going to be responsible. Absolutely. If someone is at a hundred percent capacity, you can't just add more and expect them to do more. The long argument is, AI is going to replace employees and headcounts is going to reduce and all of those things. You said something there where if someone wasn't at capacity, what do you do? Well, you do reskill and retrain them so that they're doing more challenging work and offload some of the mundane repetitive tasks to technology so that they can get that career development because that plays a huge part in their employee experience. It's not just about technology, it's not just about pay, it's not just about training and opportunity, it's not just about trust within the organization, it's not just about like I know what I'm doing every day and the C-suite is telling me and I see them living it and so I have something to model after. It's all of those things and so you have to make sure that it's not just about automation, it's not just about technology, it's not just about making time more efficient, we don't want to just focus on productivity of the human because then if you do that, then you really make the mistake of saying well productivity, if that's what it is, then automation is king, then AI is king, the machine learning is king and bots and all the things that can quote unquote even chat GPT, replace humans in some capacity, I think that there is opportunity to really bring the employee base along this journey as we start to embrace more and more different kinds of technology. And there must be other pieces to employee experience as well, so it's also about I'm assuming growing them and like not just upskilling them for that immediate project that they're working on but also you talk about career growth, you help them upskill as an individual and that's and that could be in terms of like ongoing education or subsidizing things that allow them as a human to get to the next level where they want to be. And so there's like a whole backing component that's not just about making sure that their day-to-day is not more difficult, that's great, you're already you're being a good person by not doing that. Then there's all these other things that an individual you meet we crave in our life and I do believe personally that businesses should be responsible for offering some avenue to get to where you want to go as an individual as a professional. Yeah, that's why who owns employee experience can't be one person. So let's sort of deconstruct what you just said. So we talked about systems and tools and processes. The average enterprise uses and once again I'm at the enterprise level so if you're a mid or small business this number will be significantly lower although I would argue that the percentages are probably pretty close to being the same. But the average enterprise has some 900 unique applications in the enterprise. Everything finance, HR, sales, marketing, product dev like all up all the applications only 27 to 29% of them are integrated. Now there are some that will never be integrated right. Finance may never be integrated so people can see what's going on in the books. HR might not be integrated for obvious reasons but so take some of those off the plate you know this discussion but that still means there's a tremendous amount that is not integrated and if you're a small business that even being be a higher percentage right because you don't have the internal IT staff to do that integration. So if you have seven applications that your employees have to work in and with every single day it's highly inefficient right versus having that integration sort of thread through. So process and technology you could argue is the IT responsibility. So you know as you become bigger it becomes a CIO but it could be an IT manager could be a value added reseller or systems integrator like helping you right but that person is the technology arm of it. Then you have learning onboarding all the things we were talking about career path development that tends to be HR right so that's sort of an HR element to this and then the third is who is responsible for the customer. So if you don't have a chief customer officer or a customer experience officer a chief marketing officer like who is the person either customer service or marketing that is responsible for what's happening to and with the customer. Now you have this triangulation of these three roles tech HR marketing or sales right whoever's got that position you could even add a fourth and save sales and then it's all four of them. Those four leaders they have to agree on what you're doing across both of those elements the customer and the employee. Now the smaller you get the CEO is the four so that's why I said you just pausing and just making those decisions with just one more question okay what is the implication to the employee and as you get bigger and larger you'll have more individuals handling pieces and parts of that that's where collaboration and communication cross-functional alignment is super important. Now for what are you going to say to a company that has not focused on EX for their entire their entire life and you already know that alignment across all those different orgs within within a company is difficult all those different business units. So so how do we how do we get somebody to to understand the importance of this we have them we have the numbers there but what are like very tangible takeaways that they can immediately do even at an enterprise level where they can start to see some progress and then again get the internal flywheel going as to getting people to buy into this because it will take a lot for those four to support this initiative they want. Yeah so the first thing I'd say is that I would challenge companies who have done anything in relation to customer journey mapping experience you know NPS scores customer advisory boards anything like that to understand I want to know what's happening in my customer organization right I want to make sure we're aligning our narrative in our products in our roadmap and all those things to our customer I challenge you to do the exact same thing for your employees an employee advisory board employee net promoter score it's called the EMPS right customer effort score do you have an employee effort score so almost matching KPIs with if you have customer KPIs what are you matching employee KPIs that's a simple fast way to say you maybe you don't do all of them right obviously because if you're small it gets more difficult but what's your top one and one or two and two or three and three and then you say if we just start there it will be better but what I started saying around customer was I don't know when when clients would ask me and when I was at Gartner you know what should I be doing what do you think and I'd always I used to answer let me back up I used to just answer and sort of the first three years and then I realized I was probably doing a huge disservice that I should actually ask back I don't know what are your customers want from you and then tell me about your last customer survey and then we start digging into that and then those surveys are giving me the signals I need to help advise the customer on how to improve that go to market right either with or through partners directly online offline all those things so I challenge the same thing on employee I don't know what you should do first yeah ask your employees now one of the things we found in the survey was everybody's pretty much surveying their employees pre-pandemic was kind of once a year now it's much more frequently but what we heard pretty consistently is even though they're collecting that data nobody is doing anything with it so you've asked your employees what they want to be more successful happy engage satisfied etc and they're telling you and then you kind of go well we check the box we did our employee survey let's move back to customers right to do that hard work that's required on the employee side and if you look at the Gallup employee satisfaction scores over the last decade they've not moved but two or three points and they're in the 28 to 32 percent range of employees are satisfied and it's remained almost flat but if you look at net promoter scores everybody's and PS is going up customer satisfaction is going up right all these things because that's where all the focus is so I'd say start with KPIs align what you have in customer with employee to do the survey do a small survey to your employees especially if you're small and start fixing one thing at a time I'll give you an example of an entrepreneur who I used as a story in the book Michelle Romano she was the CEO co-founder of a company in in Canada she was a shark tank a dragon yeah clear bank yeah okay so Michelle Romano and I did something together when I was up in Canada a number of years back and we were having this conversation she said you know I had I think she had like 60 or 80 employees at the time and you know she's a double unicorn so you know there are people who are single unicorn status she's a double unicorn and she's not even 40 right so she knows she's very good at what she does so she opened an email box and forgive my language but it was sort of stupid shit we do at and the company name and she just asked her employees hey what's the stupid shit we do and so employees would say something like you know I have to do these three things before I can do this if we just eliminated these two it would be much quicker and they just knocked those off really quickly right because it was stupid things that the company got a little too process oriented processes were in conflict new companies were acquired new people got hired things got changed and no one was going back to make sure that the house was still clean and so that one question opened up maybe 30 or 35 things that very quickly got fixed and now what did that do that showed that we asked we heard you we fixed things and the things they did not fix they gave a reason why not now you can't do that if you have a thousand employees or five thousand employees but you could buy group by team by division so it's more manageable so it doesn't have to be something complicated and let's plan it and we're going to do it you know Q3 it's like people overthink this I'm hearing the people overthink this a lot they just over complicated and I think you know we could go for hours into how we've overcomplicated it for customers but you know we've really overcomplicated it for employees now do you run into issues with artificially inflated positive KPIs for employees satisfaction because of the fact that they're scared for their jobs or they're scared that their manager is going to chastise them or or or do something if they don't respond in a positive way yes how do you solve for this yes so I use this example in growth IQ and I sort of pulled it into experience mindset as well but if you've ever watched the television show undercover boss that to me is a master class in what we're talking about here that I don't know why they spend the first five to seven minutes of the show talking about the executive and then putting you know makeup to disguise the executive so when they go amongst their people they won't get recognized I'm like I think it's a waste of very expensive television you know prime time first five minutes because no one would recognize them anyway because they never leave their office so if you are a leader the way to make sure KPIs aren't being artificially inflated good or bad right is to actually talk to your people town halls management by wandering around you know very tom Peters in search of excellence you know there are many ways in which you can stay connected right email someone say hey I'd like to hear your opinion on what we just did or how easy is it to do your job like you become very available transparent your empathetic and then you're listening better you ask better questions and lo and behold you start to get the pulse of things that is not in a survey that is backward looking right because the survey may take three months and now you're backward looking and so the way to stay forward looking is to stay on the front line of what's happening in your business so a la undercover boss right you've never worked in your kitchen you've never worked in your warehouse like you've never delivered your own products like you've never seen someone get hired or what they're training like the fact you don't know those things is exactly why we're in this situation where employees are saying I'm done like you know either you're going to do this for me or I'm going to go find somebody who will and they're making very different decisions because of the lack of right investment empathy and consideration many executives have had for the people who remember deliver on their brand promise they're the ones that do the work every day right they're the ones that bring business in the door executives unfortunately most of the time manage in their four walls and that just gives them such a disconnected view on what's happening for customers as well what's happening for employees you want to take a second thank the sponsor for today's episode NordPass now if you are tired of forgetting your passwords or if you're worried about their security this is where NordPass steps and you've heard of all these password managers that have been hacked have been compromised everybody's trying to get at your information it's very stressful and also just remembering all the passwords even if you're not worried about somebody getting into your information even though you 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Who does this? Who does this very well? Who is the who is the you know the the example in the industry of a leader that maybe we even know the name of somebody who you know if you if you saw them in the news they'd be like wow that I can't believe he or she is walking around the office floor and making an effort like who's that leader that we should look to. Yeah Costco has always been that you know the previous CEO would walk around the floor he was in a Costco location somewhere in the country six days a week you know into his seventies you know all the way up into retirement. Everybody knew who he was there was no way that you know he would walk in the floor and people didn't know you know you could say her kelher right from southwest you know southwest is just had a really tough 120 days and unfortunately on the employees side and the customer side kind of both simultaneous it was sort of a perfect storm but you could look at chewy doing great things for employees and then great things for customers right employees like draw little pictures of clients pets when it's their birthday or when they pass away that's the employees you could say Zappos continues to be amazing on both E and C you'll have zenith in our Zurich I'm sorry in in Europe doing amazing things for customers as well as employees you know there there are a lot but but what I'd say here is unfortunately like everything it's like they might be really humming on E but then C is paying the price they might be really humming on C and E is paying of paying the price and that's why this kind of balanced view and operating mindset is super important where you try to keep those two things as close as possible as I said they'll never be 50 50 you know in a perfect world right so you could say wow you know a particular brand is really doing a lot of stuff around employee right and so and then you and they've always done stuff that's really great for customers and so all of a sudden you start to see both kind of really begin to improve and so that's always the tricky question because one bad thing like you know look I wrote the book I did a whole case study on Southwest you know I put the last period in the book and then boom right holiday weather you know technology meltdown you know but but to that's a good point though it's not like a one and done no correct it's it's it's it's it's in perpetuity you have to it's like an ongoing correct ongoing mindset and so that that's why I said like it doesn't matter what size you are you know if you're listening to this the next time you run a team meeting you don't ask the question how difficult is it to do your job every day systems so people process technology and then from an executive level the culture what's the culture reward to your question right is it just KPIs and people are sort of faking that nothing's really happening our KPI we surveyed our employees check you know who owns employee experience as I said it is not one person but are you even at the executive level having conversations besides what does our pipeline of new talent look like and who are we losing like that's an important metric because it's a number and you can really manage that if you will but it doesn't tell you all the things around it of why are people applying why have the applications declined right like we just don't have a good pipeline like people aren't applying well why not well because all the people who left trashed us on blast door because we didn't do all these things right or you know why is this happening in the customer oh well you know have you sat in the call center and listened to you know call center calls over the last you know if you're an executive a leader sitting the call center at least once a month for a day go on sales calls once a month at least for a day sit in your market department at least once for a day your product devil like that should take up eight or nine days a month what is more important than that right to really understand going back to Michelle Romanovich Clarco right but she's a great example you know not to sideline this on that story but she stepped down as CEO because they were in hyper growth mode and they did a different kind of leader to take them to the next level so even highly successful right being really self-aware of where I can add value and where I need to bring someone in who can add value both for the customer and the employee sometimes it takes executives and leaders to step aside and bring the next you know sort of generational leader aboard what was the what was the the turnaround story from Best Buy walk me through what they did so you know listen uh uber joley is a friend of mine he was the former CEO of of Best Buy and he came in and really well what he did was almost what I just said he spent a full week in a Best Buy store I think it was in Minneapolis um and he was like chief listener that was sort of his name badge I love that he just listened to employees and listened to customers and watched the floor and watched what was happening and saw a lot of inefficiencies saw a lot of opportunity um and really stop doing some things that were happening in previous regime right and and and started focusing on the people and really saying how do we make sure if we're going to make this turn as an organization we've got to re-skill we've got to reapply what we're doing we're not going to quote unquote win against Amazon so how do we create an environment where if someone comes into us we can price match and do those kinds of things so that we keep the business and we don't act like it's not happening like because the employee is like look I just worked so hard with this customer for two hours then we're about to buy they got on their phone yeah they're going to go home and order it um and so you know I think that a true focus on the people made a huge difference on the performance of Best Buy and you could argue Unilever is probably another one another story that I that I used where it was sort of training at the management layer and they saw that it was so effective that sort of second and third tier managers wanted to learn how to be a better manager and they opened it up to everybody and they just saw retention rates increase satisfaction increase people were applying for stretch roles and they were getting the opportunity because they had this foundation of training so you know it's important um and often I'll hear from small businesses we can't afford to make those investments so what if we invest in people and they leave right the right I was going to say that's way more expensive it's exponentially more expensive versus if they leave if they leave versus if you invest in them and they stay but I okay go ahead but what if they invest in them to train them and then they take that training and they leave right and that's a lot of fear if you will at the CFO level even the executive level right that we've made all these investments from a um career perspective on learning new technology or new systems or you know we paint for their MBA I mean there's lots of ways that you can invest in your people um the the response that I say is well what if you don't invest in them and they stay right because if you don't invest in them and they stay then they don't have what they need to be successful then they're not having a great experience their customers are not having a great experience so there is this fine line between proving ROI when it comes to the soft skills of humans that actually have the greatest impact um on that connection during that moment that matters when an employee touches a customer that's what I'm talking about is when that moment happens that's the experience mindset it's not all things HR and it's not all things customer it is really when those two things come together either virtually in person via technology a hybrid I don't care right just human and customer or branding customer I've actually found you know to that point I actually I've always found that when I invest in people they they don't leave and that's there's no data to back that I've just found anecdotally when you invest in somebody and you care about them and you and you help them progress to the next level in their career they'll they'll they'll be a good employee for a period of time maybe if they do leave that's it is what it is but I can guarantee you like while they're there the ROI I've never measured it but it seems to be exponential in that person versus if you hire somebody and you don't invest in them at all I feel like they feel like they're a commodity they're they're just for a particular purpose and then they'll just go to the next paycheck because if you're not investing in them why would they feel emotionally attached to that business it's just you know money that comes every two weeks and that's it but when you invest in somebody I mean I've had people that as as a you know I've been in several leadership roles where I've hired people and people have followed me through my career so yes I've invested in them as a leader and then fine they take the next job but in five years from now I have an incredible person that comes back to work for the next org that I'm in too so there's all these benefits of just investing in people and I've never found it to be a detriment I've never I've never put somebody through a course or spent extra time with somebody and been like oh that was such a waste I wish I didn't do that yeah zero zero out of 10 times that yeah and I'd say you know for small business they may be I can't I can barely afford to do all the things that are being asked of me as an entrepreneur so does it need to be something that cost money could it be you mentor an hour every week with you know a handful of people and that changes every quarter that you spend time with them right you help them and mentor them and coach them not about how to do their job not about how to use the technology but more you know what it's like to run an effective meeting how to write a better executive email like what have you learned when you faced you know challenges with collaborating or communicating with others in your organization how do I ever come that you know those kinds of things can be helped with mentoring and that's where to your point you know you make those investments if some especially for small businesses times get tough let's just say the pandemic and you have to close the doors and no one's working but you say hey listen just hang on for four weeks I can't pay you people will be like that's okay like I know when we come out of the end of this four weeks or we come on the other side of this I've taken a pay cut for six months that when I come on the other side of this I trust that they have my back because that sort of employee experience is so strong and it is a competitive weapon for you in keeping and retaining top talent attracting top talent and then those two things happen then you get great customers you're able to grow the business and then that's where to the point right that sort of flywheel of benefit between that greater employee experience leading to a greater customer experience drives growth I love this I would even say that you know you probably have data to back this up but post-COVID with everybody comfortable working remotely this is probably even more important than ever because if you don't invest in these people it's not even like they have to get a job and in the same commuting distance from their house it's very easy to switch companies if they feel the company does not support them it does not treat them well yeah let's just pick let's just pick when the pandemic happened it's a stat I use in the book and I'm going to do this for off the top of my head so forgive me if I'm often percentages but okay was sort of when the pandemic hit and many went to work from home that the number one sort of software application that was just the hottest thing to acquire at that time was employee tracking software keystrokes video what are you doing you're not in my four walls and what did that say well you trusted me to be an employee when you can see me but you don't trust me when you can't see me and you know some call centers were actually requiring customer service representatives to keep their camera on eight hours a day while they were there so they manager could see they were sitting at their desk with their headset on talking they were watching keystrokes to make sure what they were doing it was like a 3,000 percent increase in the sale of employee tracking software or just tracking software like forget just employee and that sends a very terrible message right like you know I mean I've worked home for going on almost 19 years now you know so this was nothing new for me but not many people are in that situation where they've you know worked for a fortune 500 company and worked from home this whole time and so I would say that that says everything about and trust was one of the things we found was a key indicator to employees giving that sort of giving their all and being satisfied in work is that they trusted and they were trusted that that has huge that sends a huge signal in the wrong direction so to your point right that so much changed during COVID of the employee employer relationship and employees for the very first time according to the Edelman trust barometer took over customers for the first time in 10 years as the number one stakeholder to long-term success and for the 10 years prior it was customer and so that's no coincidence right employee all the sudden everyone was talking about it in Ernie's call everyone was talking about the great resignation everyone was talking about I can't open my doors because I can't find talent I used to be open 12 hours a day I'm open eight hours a day sorry that the flights are delayed we don't have baggage people sorry that the rooms aren't cleaned and we can't do that because we don't have anybody to clean the rooms in our hotel and on and on and on and on where did all those people go where did they go like they had to go somewhere they just clearly didn't come back to you what does that tell you yeah yeah okay um before we wrap this up just anything that you'd want like one last lesson we covered a lot of different things and and honestly I even had some points that I pulled out from like the first book that we didn't even go into what I feel like that could be like another hour so I'm not gonna start down that path I'm just gonna have you back in the future that works that works so because that could be a whole other podcast so for for this particular topic some some last thoughts that we didn't go into any questions that I didn't ask that I should have just lessons that you want to teach over to the audience then I'll get all the socials and whatnot but yeah go ahead I can't think of anything I mean really we covered off a lot yeah yeah we covered up a lot and I wanted to read the book too you know so yeah I covered up a lot I mean I think you know I tried to make sure I said small medium enterprise it wasn't just you know big companies with lots of people I tried to give you know advice across the size and spectrum of of organizations so you're good you're good okay so if people want to reach out to you what are the socials and also where do they get the book outside of like the Amazon's and all the other normal spots where should they go uh so you know if you want to keep in touch with me uh you can follow me on LinkedIn I'm actually at a connection so there's no more connections to be had unfortunately I maxed out I don't know how that happens but anyway they're like no more so you can follow me on LinkedIn at Tiffany Bova you can follow me on Twitter at Tiffany underscore Bova Instagram and Facebook are at Tiffany Bova you can get growth IQ pretty much anywhere there's an audible version you'd have to listen to me for a little more than you know five hours you did it yourself I did it myself it was a whole experience and I'm about to do the new one in a couple weeks and then it's on Kindle it's translated in 10 languages but she's about four and a half years old now so now you know I think the U.S. might be the only version that we can get our hands on because that one keeps republishing reprinting rather and then experience mindset you can buy at your favorite bookstores it's all on sale today preorder and it comes out on June 6th awesome okay last question I ask everybody before we wrap this up you know you've had an incredible career worker some of the largest organizations in the world you've released several books now after all of this what does success mean to you I would tell you that success means something very different to me than it met 15 years ago or let's call it 20 I've been intact now almost almost 30 years I've shuttered to say I guess it is almost 30 years because I was 27 and I just turned 57 so it's been almost 30 years and and I'd say that success for me used to be you know what's the title how much money am I making what am I doing and then it kind of was like okay what kind of impact can I have in a more broader scale right let me write a book let me advise companies those that you sort of rattled off and thousands of others and then when it was time for me to make a career switch after a gardener I came to Salesforce for a couple reasons but the number one reason was you know whenever I went to a Salesforce event as an analyst I would leave those events wanting to be a better human being and that said a lot to me if I take a third of my time now and in some way give back do I lecture at you know Columbia University or you know Texas A&M USC Wharton you know do I lecture do I do things for you know women in tech at the UN do I speak at the World Economic Forum to not for profits on how they can do things like yes all of those things so I try to spend you know a third of my time doing that how can I have greater impact in areas that maybe don't have visibility and opportunity as much as others and that's really what I now measure my success on which is different than what I measured my success on a decade ago