 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 Tiffany Bova, who is the Global Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce. Just written a book, great book, by the way. Growth IQ, I guess it's coming out later in August of 2018. But Tiffany, 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 a half years of Salesforce, what have you learned about customer engagement and how actionable is it really? Well, you know, Peter, it's a great question because I'd say this, you know, I thought I knew the answer to that question when I started 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 know, you're going to go from point A to point B or you're going to catch a taxi or you're 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 buying, you know, software from someone like Salesforce or consulting or watching this show. You know, 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. And 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, Tiffany, I like the book and there's three or four points that I really want to draw out. I want to start with the first one though. And let's go back to this notion of engagement. You make the observation in the book and I also have a background in thinking about customer engagement, customer experience, but you make a great point in the book that your brand is the promise you're making to the marketplace. Customer experience is the customer side of the engagement. It seems as though if there's a significant mismatch 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 massive, you know, research from all kinds of people, whether it's Mackenzie or Bain or Gartner or Forrester 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. And the gap between those two things, unfortunately, even with all the advancements with technology, I feel like it's getting wider, right? Because they're still sort of, brands are still sort of pushing out what they think is interesting and engaging and customers are going, it's kind of not so much. And so this is 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. It's a long discussed topic of outside in versus inside out. There'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. But it all starts with that impedance mismatch. 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. If nothing else, if nobody reads anything else out of the book, just that simple idea that it's not NPV, it's not other types of measures or net promoter score, 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. And 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? I think it's, 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 as 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, you know, direct to consumer online? Are you going to go into retail? Like 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're going to say, I want to reduce churn. It's not just, well, I mean a lower price because that's going to be a reason for people to stay. It's, well, wait a second. Is, are the platforms easy to use? Can people open a ticket easily? It's always in combination. Do I have visibility into who might churn? And to who might churn, right? But the first place people fail to start, let's go back to your original question of this gap between what customers expect and what business you're going, 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 in 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 where are you going to combine those efforts with? And then the third thing and equally important 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? 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 that 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 then getting them to come back is more expensive than it would have 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 and the fact that you have to be very honest about what you can and cannot affect. There are some things you may want to sequence and you may want to follow the sequence 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 and so had they not done mail and started with streaming maybe they couldn't have 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 they still have hundreds of thousands of mail customers including my mom like 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 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 and so had those timings been off or 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 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 what's really in the marketplace customer regulatory competitor all those other things we think about you think about the combination of recipes or combination responses and then how you're going to sequence them out and then that sequencing decision then goes back and says and what do I need to refine about my understanding of context I got that right? You've got that right and I would tell you that So you're 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 4 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 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 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 and so I tried to tell the story that people could say oh we're already on this path should we 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 of this is I don't want people to think this is something completely flip the chess board over and start from scratch I want you to pivot ever so slowly and make adjustments in real time so that you're not having to do this as kind of evolutionary versus revolutionary kind of transformation Yeah so strategies that seem to work today or feature three things and it kind of comes from clutrain manifesto agile they're empirical they're based on data they're opportunistic they identify what really can be done and they're iterative they take smaller steps and they do that so let's let me let me return back to kind of the notion of engagement just for a second one of the reasons why this book has so much prescriptive power is because there is a dramatic shift globally in market power used to be the sellers had the market power and therefore the information at your disposal that you use 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 and each other and use that source of information to help you make decisions very very significant profound shift and that's in many respects what's driving experience historically though we've talked about sales and marketing alignment about how we got to get the right messages 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 the whole notion of customer service and sustaining alignment between expectations and actuality in the customer service function becomes especially important if I got that right? You nailed it I mean I would say also you know in 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 the 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 Alokwa 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 and so when I was running both sales and marketing I could argue with myself but when I was just selling I understand this marketing giving us leads sales not doing something with it and then when I had customer service 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 and 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 leads to enable sales and marketing and products and so I would tell you that in my opinion the disconnection between what customers expect and what 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 oversimplifying 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 you take us 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 value 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 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 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 so because I thought that they had won large because of marketing and I said so tell me about the 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 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 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 as part of a strategy give us a 30 second, 45 second why is social good becoming a viable strategy or a viable pattern one of the combinations that's working today well I'd say you know Salesforce was founded on the one one one 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 like 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 Starbucks just announced how they're going to fly immigrant children home if they need to Starbucks is now 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 one one one 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 startups 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 no reason why you can't start to find a place where you can inject it going forward but I'm super excited about that Tiffany Boba global growth innovation evangelist sales force talking about the book growth IQ again great book thank you very prescriptive and I mean and I generally hate business books lot of case studies thanks very much for being on the show 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