Tiffani Bova: Growth is a Thinking Game

The one thing about growth is it is never one thing. It isn’t about hiring the best employees or delivering the most incredible customer experience or launching the most innovative products – it is all of them, working in combination.

To achieve growth, we must out-think and out-execute our competition. We must find ways to ignite a beginner’s mind that is open to new ideas and ways of doing things. We can’t fall back on old habits and say, ‘that isn’t the way we do it here,’ or ‘we tried that a few years ago and it didn’t work.’ As business leaders, we must be willing to disrupt ourselves if we expect those around us to be able to respond to disruptions.

In this keynote, Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Evangelist at Salesforce and WSJ bestselling author of Growth IQ, inspires attendees to take planned action with a greater understanding of the interdependencies in the decisions made around growth. During the session, she will share the Growth IQ framework including several of the “10 Growth Paths” covered in her book.

You will learn:

• The internal obstacles to profitable growth.
• How to think about growth paths rather than strategies.
• How to create the context that leads to growth.
• How to sequence and time growth actions.
• Approaches to gauge organizational health.

Slides

Find out more about BoS

Get details about our next conference, subscribe to our newsletter, and watch more of the great BoS Talks you hear so much about.

Transcript

Tiffani Bova: Thank you. Well, good morning, everybody. I see people out there. So I just want to first thank Nick for talking about the 1% pledge. Salesforce was actually the founder of that entire concept. It started with something called 111: 1% of equity, 1% of time and 1% of our software since its inception, 22 years ago, when Marc Benioff, our CEO, came up with the idea, we’ve given away a half a billion dollars worth of equity, 7.2 million hours of volunteer time, And we give software to 50,000 nonprofits, purpose over profit. Values drive value. If you want to learn more about what we did, Marc wrote a great book called Trailblazer that you can read all about our entire philosophy around the 1% pledge.

But I’m not here to talk about that, as was mentioned. My name is Tiffany Bova and the growth evangelist at Salesforce. I’ve been here a little more than six years. But prior to this particular role, I was a research fellow at Gartner for a decade covering sales growth and transformation for startups mid sized business and global enterprises, specifically in tech. So this conversation about growth for startups in software in SaaS is something I’ve been around for almost 17 years. Prior to that, I was a individual contributing sales rep for software, hardware services company, big transformations, and my last sort of leadership role was running a division, for those of you who are old enough to remember, Gateway computers, I ran a division of Gateway and built that business from about 10 million to almost 300 million in less than two years.

So I understand the concept of growth, and because I’ve advised so many companies, this presentation is a culmination of a lot of things. One, what I did as a practitioner. Two, what I did as an advisor globally for software companies on their growth paths, and three, the work that I’ve been doing here at Salesforce now for almost seven years.

So let me start by saying that I believe that growth is a thinking game. We can’t always outspend our competition. Like when I just made that comment, we’ve given away a half a billion dollars in our equity. And you guys are like, Well, I’m a $5 million software company. That number is so greatly different that you go, Well, of course, somebody like a sales force can do that. But ultimately you can out think your competition. Even if you can’t outspend from a marketing standpoint, that you can’t outspend from a resource and headcount standpoint, you can get smarter about the decisions that you make when it comes to what am I going to do today versus what will I do in the future?

The importance of the Beginner’s Mind

OK, so in the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few. So this is a wonderful quote that I want you to keep in mind as you go through the remainder of this day, that the expert’s mind is, this is the way we do it. It’s the way we’ve always done it. We’ve done it this way. I know that it works. I’m going to continue to do it going forward, because that is where I am the most comfortable a beginner’s mind is growth and comfort do not coexist. You’ve got to get very uncomfortable with the decisions that you’re going to make, and that requires a beginner’s mind. I don’t need you to completely flip over the apple cart and forget everything you’ve learned along the way, but what I ask of you is to give yourself sort of some time, half an hour every single day, to approach an opportunity, a problem, a challenge, with a new mind. And the best way to do that is to get out of your office.

I often get asked, Tiffany, if you could give me one response on how to grow my business. What’s the one thing I should be focused on? I’m here to tell you that the one thing about growth is it’s never one thing that’s the great analyst, consultant answer. But it is true. It is true. So let me set the scene on kind of how this is going to evolve in this sort of time. I’m going to be with you this morning. We’re going to do about 45 minutes of this presentation, which should set up some beginner mind thinking. We’re then going to do probably a 30 minute. A Q and A workshop, we’re going to pass out some some post it notes. You guys can write some questions. We’re going to do a little bit of brainstorming on ways in which we can get out of our comfortable mind and into our uncomfortable space so that we can find new opportunities for growth. I don’t need to share with anybody in this room that we’re in a new world, but from a go to market, selling and marketing perspective, we have absolutely exploded on new channels.

Now, 22 years ago, in 2000 I was sitting in an office in Atlanta. I was running sales, service and marketing for the us’s largest web hosting company. We were about four times the size of Rackspace. We actually almost bought Rackspace. Most of our shared intellectual property was picked up by GoDaddy. Our dedicated business has now become another sort of web hosting company. But I was the beta client, client number two for Eloqua, and I was client number three for constant contact. Back then, when we were talking about technology, the marketing technology stack was about six deep. Salesforce was 18 months or two years old at the time.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Modern Market

Now there’s over 8500 marketing technology many of you may play in that space, options for customers on how to sell, where to sell, online chat, offline in social media, face to face in the virtual world, there is no shortage of opportunities for growth, but there are greater expectations from customers, the expectations over the last two and a half years, if you thought that they were sort of accelerating pre pandemic, they exponentially accelerated during the pandemic, small and mid businesses made more investments in technology in order to keep themselves afloat. Those that were smart enough to make those investments had a much greater likelihood at remaining in business. Those that were not willing to make some of those pivots may not be around at all. More competition, the barrier to entry to develop software all over the world, to use software as a service, infrastructure as a service. All these service options have allowed small businesses to get their hands on technology that used to be reserved just for the enterprise.

You have small businesses that are 10 or 15 people that are generating a billion dollars worth of revenue because they partner to do those things align purpose. I won’t talk about that. You just had an amazing presentation on aligning purpose. But customers, trust me when I tell you, customers are looking to you to say, do you align with my individual purpose, and if you do, I am more willing to do business with you. Like, what is your stance on equal pay? What is your stance on the social issues that are happening? What are you doing around the planet? How many of you actually buy Patagonia clothing I’m going to play on this, and how many of you do it because you believe and agree in his mission, I will buy Patagonia before I buy a brand that I know has sweatshops or doesn’t pay equally, or just dumps clothes that are not purchased into the landfills like I will make those decisions, and more and more that is happening and then new experiences. What are the experiences your customers expect from you, pre sales, sales, post sales, when they’re not a customer anymore? What are those experiences that your employees expect?

Unfortunately, the gap is getting wider instead of slimmer, because it’s moving so rapidly, we’re having a difficult time keeping pace, and customers want to buy on their terms, we’re all adding new channels. Businesses use an average of three different sales channels to sell and buy. So you may say, I have face to face, I have call center and I have e commerce. You may say I have social media, I have face to face and I have email sales. You may have whatever it might be, but ultimately, it’s getting even more complex in the way you’re selling. Is it a one time sale? Is it subscription? Is it usage and consumption? Is it milestone, value based, outcome based, projects, pricing and selling motions. If you said, Look, our software is $1,000 a month, I’m just making this up. It’s $1,000 a month, or you’re going to pay us a percentage of what you’re going to gain because of using our software? Would you do that? Or would you say, Nope, $1,000 a month. Would you try to do usage? I remember we tried to do usage in 2003 2004 nobody had the capability to help us do usage.

So I was running an as a service business off an Excel spreadsheet. It wasn’t pretty, but we grew to 125 million recurring revenue by brute force. But we had one channel. It was only online, and it was only sort of the call center right helping with those online purchases. But how do you pay your salespeople? What kind of skills do you need? Is all determined by which channels and go to market you actually expect. How many of you familiar with the jobs to be done concept? Amazing. Okay, so Salesforce oriented around jobs to be done a couple of years back, and it has really lined us up to making sure that we’re not developing tools and software, because what we think is important, but because what is the job to be done over time?

And while this statement by Theodore Levitt is true, I think he didn’t go far enough, because we don’t actually want quarter inch holes. We don’t go stand next to the wall and go, isn’t that a beautiful quarter inch hole. We actually want to hang a shelf. We want to build a desk. We want to put something together. We want to hang a picture of our family like ultimately, that’s the job. That’s the value from that hole. Think he stopped too short. Over time, we know that jobs remain similar, whether you were bartering to sell something and then eventually began to sell something. What changes is the solution. How we do things is what changed in this particular example, right? I might send you smoke signals and say, come over to my village for dinner. Today, I’d send you a text message, come over to my house for dinner. The job was to invite you to dinner. The way we did. It was from smoke signals to Wi Fi and text message. The job was the same. The solution is, what changed.

The Role of Employee Experience in Customer Experience

And so if you can orient yourself around your go to market messaging, why you are value, why or you are adding those things. If you can orient the external communication around jobs to be done, it goes on much further than you talking about the product, the speeds and feeds. And I know that that may seem obvious to you, but if I put my Gartner hat back on and I said I’m going to go look at 10 of your websites, how many of you feel that I would not find speeds and feeds technology? How many of you think I would not find that information? So all of you agree I would find it? How many of you lead with the job to be done solution of how you are going to actually solve and help your customers be successful in using your technology? 123, you guys got to go a little higher or otherwise, I think only one person in this room. How many do you? The rest of you? Do you have a mix of both? Or is it very technical? So if it’s very technical, we got a lot of work to do, unless your audience is a CIO. But we know that most SMBs don’t have a CIO. We know that the technology budget has spread beyond the CIO. I was part of the team that made the prediction at Gartner that the chief marketing officer would spend more than the Chief Information Officer. And after I made we made that prediction, Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP all went out and bought marketing technology companies, Salesforce bought Pardot and exact target, Microsoft bought SAP, bought Oracle, bought all to go after those dollars. So if you’re speaking to a CIO, they don’t only hold the budget any longer.

So the first thing I challenge you on the beginner’s mind is write down: do we talk about the solution or just the technology? Who is your persona buyer? Does it match that? Otherwise you’re going to turn someone off, who’s there looking for that job to be done. So how do you build this modern growth organization? What are the things you should be considering? The first thing I’ll tell you is experience was something we talked about kind of arbitrarily, and this is what I would get back when I would sit in front of executives of probably I advised the largest 50 tech companies in the world over the course of a decade, and helped the AWS is literally hire their very first salesperson. So from zero to what they are now, what is that go to market? What we thought about was, what is the experience of the customer that they’re going to have when they engage with your brand?

And lo and behold, this quote of mine has a sort of survived the test of time that customers will remember the experience they have with a brand much longer than the price that they paid. And you may say, I don’t believe you, Tiffany, eight out of 10 of my sales reps or we lose a deal. I always hear we lost because of price. How many hear that? Right? We lost because of price. So let’s use a little example. Here. 88% of customers feel the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Is as important as its products and services. Now, speaking to a room full of entrepreneurs and you guys make the greatest software and solutions and as a service, solutions that ever has walked the face of the earth. It is fantastic. I believe you when you tell me that it may be better than us. It may be better than you know, other of the largest sort of 10 in the world, all true. Probably, maybe could be, but if the experience a customer has when they engage with your website, your people, your post sales, your service, your FAQs, your bot, your emails, it will not matter how good your product or service is.

If you don’t believe that, let’s use this example. How many of you caught an Uber from the airport to the hotel this week? OK, keep your hands high for just a second. So everybody raise OK. How many of you remember what you paid? Leave it to a room of entrepreneurs. All right, so three, okay, then of all of you, raise your hand again. Who caught Uber? How many of you remember if the driver was talkative? Did they drive well, you know, was it a good experience? Yep, all the hands stay up. And I have to say that I’ve traveled around this world in 2019 I flew 275,000 miles. Trust me, I’ve been in a bunch of Ubers. Boston Airport was the worst by a long mile. It took us a half an hour to get out of the Uber parking lot, minus the fact I took me 15 minutes to find where I needed to go, which is probably personal issue.

But the other example, let’s talk about a restaurant. You go to an amazing restaurant, the food is spectacular and the service is bad. Would you go back? No, the food was good, the service was spectacular. Would you go back? Yes. So we unconsciously make these decisions all the time about what brands we do. Do you immediately go to price? You know, I could say like, look, we’re at the seaport hotel, and let’s just say across the street was a four seasons. The job to be done is, I need a place to sleep when I’m not home. Why do people pick one over the other when the job to be done can be solved exactly the same way, in a $500 room night or a $700 room night. And if you were at Dreamforce last week, a $2,500 room night, and then across the street is a $250 room night, this is a perfectly fantastic hotel. But why would you stay across the street the experience you are paying for that.

We make decisions every single every single day. So I’m going to ask this question, who are the keepers of your customer experience? Promise, usually this is a build, so I gave away the answer. But who is the keeper? Pretend you don’t see the word underneath. Who is the keeper of your customer experience? Promise it is not you. It is your employees. It is your employees. Every single day when you get call into a call center and they’re kind of grumpy and rude, it reflects on the brand. If you stand in line at a fast food restaurant or and the employee is rude, it impacts your opinion. Remember, the food is good, the service was terrible, you won’t go back. Yet, we spend so much time making sure that we improve the experience for customers that we forget about the employees, and I will talk about that in a little bit, but this one stat is very telling, employees have taken over. Customers are the number one priority stakeholder for businesses to ensure long term success. This is, according to Edelman in their Trust Barometer from last year.

For the 10 years prior, it was customer pandemic hits. Great resignation happens now we have quiet, quitting, whatever you want to call it, and employees bump to number one, because if you don’t have employees, you’re not able to deliver service. So we just had Dreamforce in San Francisco last week, which in 2019 we had, let’s just say, maybe 130,000 people live in person in San Francisco, just a small little event for some friends. This year, we had 35,000 and not because we didn’t want more, but because the city couldn’t handle more, there wasn’t enough people to clean the streets, and there wasn’t enough taxis, and there’s not enough Uber drivers, and there’s not enough people in the restaurants at the hotels, and there’s not enough cleaning staff at the hotels. They could not handle that kind of size the way they could have handled in 19 because employees were like, I’m out and I’m not going to come back to work unless I sort of agree on a series of things.

But employees aren’t always happy, and it’s impacting customer experience and growth. If your employees aren’t happy, trust me when I tell you, your customers won’t be. Employees expect the same kind of experience they have outside of work inside of work. So we all can say, you know, I use this very easy example. If I’m in the office and I need some printing paper, I can go and get it, you know, in the supply closet. If I’m at home and I need printing paper and it’s over $50 I have to get approval. That’s an example. That’s not true, but use that as an example. And so why is it so difficult? And then it’s like, OK, I have to fill out this form, and then my manager has to approve it, and it goes into the bill, and then you get a PO number, and then you can go back to the system and you can order. And when you’re at home and you want it, you can go, Yep, I need a, you know, a box of printing paper, and I’ll take it at 2pm today. It’s that fast if you did it personally, if you do it professionally, it’s like, I got to do all these steps. Something that basic is difficult, but technology is probably the biggest.

The average enterprise has 900 apps. Now mind you, some of those are HR and finance, and they may never need to be integrated, but the truth is, only 29% of those 900 applications are actually integrated. So if any of you are in the room and you’re responsible for the technology that your company uses internally, take a picture of this slide, because what happens when your technology is not integrated? I’m sorry, but I want to hear the joke, frustration. What workarounds? So I’m a call center rep, you call in, you’re hot, you are really upset. You want something fixed. I want to help you. I am a call center rep. I did not show up this morning to piss you off. I showed up to help you. That’s why I do this. All of a sudden, I have to get into five systems to serve you. One system says you have this product. One system to you says you no longer have that product. This system over here says I don’t even know who he is. This system over here says he owes us money, and I’m a call center rep going, What am I supposed to do in this situation? And, oh, by the way, my metric is get off the phone in two minutes. So what happens? Bad experience. I’m frustrated. I can’t serve the customer. The experience is bad. Who is the keeper of that your employee?

Let me just back this up really quick. So I was standing on a stage in Canada a number of years back, and I made this statement. I did not think it was a coincidence that Salesforce is one of the best places to work globally. If it’s not number one, it’s in the top five. Pretty much around the world. It’s one of the most innovative companies in the world, and it’s the fastest growing enterprise software company over the last 22 years. I didn’t think that was a coincidence, so we went to our CMO at the time, and I said, I want to prove this out. This conversation of happy employee, happy customer, happy employee, happy customer, greater growth has been said by a lot of people over the last 100 years. It’s not something new. Herb Kelleher, Richard Branson, the list is long of people who said that. But I wanted to prove causation. I wanted to prove a direct correlation. So we went out and we did primary research.

We went out and did some primary research, which I’ll share with you, the QR code at the end, and you guys can download it at your leisure and read it. But this was the stated biggest internal challenges for companies revenue growth. On the left is employee. On the right is the C suite tied for number. One for employee is outdated tech. Where does it fall for the C suite number six? That is the biggest disconnect. Some of that is because executives don’t actually use the technology that your employees use every day, right? You get a roll up report someone comes and tells you call center volume is high, but you’ve never even seen what technology the call center agent actually uses, or our deal velocity is slowing and the CEO says, Why is deal velocity slowing down? And the sales leader says, Let me go find out. And they take two seconds to go and look, and there’s 78 fields on the first page of the CRM system. I’m not exaggerating, and we got some laughs, because that is the truth. Trust me when I tell you, don’t add any just go with what’s there. And then you have nine stages in the sales process. Outdated tech is going to hold you back from growth next too many redundant processes. Departments are siloed, data and technology systems are not integrated. The one I really enjoyed, though was number five, poor leadership, lack of vision by employees. Guess what number it came in for executives?

That would be a fixed mindset in action: can’t possibly be us. Has to be the employees. So this was really telling. We unpacked underneath each of these and really tried to understand what is the pain point between the employee and the customer, and in when it came to seamless tech, and I said it was the largest disconnect. I wanted to really bring this home. 52% of the C suite believe that the technology their company provides is working effectively, which means 48% of the C suite we surveyed around the globe knows it’s not working effectively, and they’re good with that, 32% of employees believe that the technology their company provides is working effectively. But the one that keeps me up at night is this last one 20% of customer facing employees strongly agree that their company is providing great tech that is seamless and helps them collaborate easily. Only 20% which means 80% of your employees think you, the collective you that what you’ve given them technically is not helping them do their job, and if you slow them down doing their job, guess what happens? The customer has a bad experience. So if you wonder why employees are like, I’m out. It isn’t just pay and compensation, while important and definitely in sort of the top five, when you peel back the onion on why they’re going a lot of it is lack of career development, lack of transparency and trust. I don’t have the tools and systems I need to be successful in my job. They’re not investing in my career, in my capabilities. I used to know how to do my job. They deployed new technology, and I don’t know what to do with that, and it actually slows them down.

So if you’re looking to scale, you have to get this right. And why does it matter? Why does it matter? If you have happy employees, if you have happy customers, why does it matter? It matters on two fronts, right? If you have happy employees, you have lower attrition, you have greater engagement, you have greater commitment. They’re more willing to go the extra mile. They will do through brute force, whatever is needed to bring in that deal close the quarter, serve that customer. Why it matters on the customer side, the Uber and restaurant example I gave you, because we are all making decisions about the experience every single day, but the fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job. If your employees love their job, you have a much better opportunity at having happy customers. You get those two things right, you get greater growth. So let’s dig into the numbers. If you have employee experience as a top priority, we found a 1.3x growth in client satisfaction KPIs, right? So if your employees are happy, you’re going to see a lift in the KPIs that you are tracking for your customers. Could be net promoter score, could be customer effort index could be customer satisfaction. Could be your survey data, whatever it might be if you have customer experience as a top priority.

We saw 1.4x growth in employee satisfaction KPIs over those who do not. But when you get them both right, we see 1.8x so for a billion dollar brand, it’s a $40 million impact. Now I’m not saying you’re a billion dollar brand, so if you’re a 5 million. Dollar brand, a 10, 100 whatever the number is, you could do the math. This is low hanging fruit. For you. Improve the experience and satisfaction and engagement of your employees. You will have better results on the customer side. You get those two things right. And so this was the Forbes study, which, as I said, I’ll give you the QR code, and so you can actually see the name of companies. This was all publicly traded. This was in the US.

I will give you two examples. The most customer centric company on the planet is Amazon. How happy are their employees? One of the greatest customer experience stories in the coffee business is Starbucks, how happy are their employees? So you can have really good CX, and just because your employees go that extra mile is not because they’re having a great experience. They do it because that’s what they do. They love their job, whatever it might be. So one will not lift the other. You have to start. The starting point is always employee experience. You can’t start at CX and get a lift. In EX, you get a little bit, but you will not get what you get if you’re going to really try to start here.

So what we did was we went out and looked at Glassdoor ratings, customer service, indexes, growth rates, net promoter scores, everything that’s publicly available. We plot, plotted it out on a two by two, because apparently when I left Gartner, I cannot call it a quadrant anymore, anyway. So in the two by two, in the right, right, you see the eight and a half percent compounded annual growth rate. Now, if you get one of them right, you’ll see it’s not that you have zero or negative you just don’t get that multiplier effect of the two working in harmony together, right, that virtuous cycle. But let me be really clear, if you have exceptional CX, it does not mean you’re going to have exceptional EX.

The Seller’s Dilemma

So revenue generation is getting harder. I coined this term, the seller’s dilemma, after Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, which is a great book as well. And one of the very last times I got an opportunity to speak with him, I sort of shared with him that I borrowed the innovator and the concept and applied it to the seller’s dilemma. And it was about: how do you as sales leaders, sort of change the engine on the airplane as it’s in the air while you’re still trying to hit numbers, you are always going to default to hitting numbers. You’re going to ignore some of the internal challenges you have, because you don’t want to slow down the revenue engine, but it will begin to diminish, and you will start to hit a growth stall if you don’t optimize and focus on the basics. We get very excited about the shiny things and where we’re going, and we forget about the mechanics, and we end up with 900 apps, and only 27% of them integrated, because we’re racing as fast as we can, and we’re not doing the right things. And the processes are outdated. The systems are outdated, the teams are siloed.

All that happens because internal inertia is: we’ll deal with it later. And if you’re small and you want to grow, you have to deal with it now. And if you want to grow in hyper growth, you most definitely need to do it now, because there is a lack of time. 66% of a seller’s day is spent on non selling activities. What did you hire a salesperson to do? Sell. But instead, we have 78 fields on the home page of the CRM system because one executive wants to know these two things, and this executive wants to know this one piece of data, and this one executive wants to know this, and it’s not advancing the ability for the seller to actually close business. And by the way, the downstream of 66% of a seller’s time spent on non selling activities is the average. Globally of sales teams hitting quota is 54% of sales teams on day one week, one month, one quarter, one of a year, will miss quota.

I remember in my last selling job, as I said, running a division of Gateway. It was the first week of a third quarter, and I walked into the CEO’s office at the time and I said, we’re going to miss numbers. It was like day five. I It wasn’t a really good career moving statement, but he at least could not say that I was not transparent and telling the truth, right? I was like, Look, I’m going to tell you why. The numbers just don’t play out. You’ve cut my sales team in half. You’ve pulled back market. I just. Don’t have enough people that if 100% of my selling team hit 100% of quota, I’m still 60% of the number you’ve given me. Math doesn’t work. So then it was okay. Well, what are you gonna do? You either need to give me more people or more I mean, just because 50% are going to miss quota, so I’m going to do worse than 60% so that’s why I’m in here. I’m in here telling you so you know, really early whether you’re going to hit numbers or not. You know, if I started to dig into your business, I’d be like, what percentage of your sales team hits quota? What percentage of your their time is spent selling? I start to ask these questions, which we’ll talk about in our little workshop. But those are the things. Those are the dials that has everything to do with internal inertia, processes, systems, reporting, structure, org, people, process, tech. The next is that you can give them back time if you start to use technology. This is not about Salesforce technology. This is just, I’m just saying, I hope you use us, but don’t use nothing.

The Need for Internal Optimization

You can automate things. You can use intelligence. You can take the data, analyze it, use those insights to make different decisions, right? If you keep doing the same thing and you’re collecting all this data. Save the money. Don’t collect the data if you’re not going to do anything with the information you have. Don’t collect it. Don’t waste your time. Don’t put 78 fields if you’re not going to do anything with it. Don’t capture it. Try to take as much off the seller’s plate as you possibly can, to let them do what you want them to do. The other thing behind this is that, unfortunately, we are spending way too much time focusing our sellers on the mechanics, how to use the technology. What is the process? Here’s the seven stages of our sales process. Here’s what you have to do in each stage, call 100 people. 10 will call you back. Three will set a meeting. One will close. How many of you still train that call 100 people a day, whatever the number is, 10, we’ll call you back three. How many of you play that numbers game? Nobody. So what do you do? Let sellers call whoever they want. Anybody? Nobody, no. Sales people, awesome.

Okay, so we are so hyper focused on training our sellers to do the mechanics. Trust me when I tell you I know a few things for true one is companies do two things and that’s it. You make stuff and just sell stuff. That’s kind of it. You make stuff and you sell stuff. If you don’t make good stuff, you can’t sell good stuff. If you can’t sell good if you can’t sell stuff, you won’t be able to make any more stuff. I’m oversimplifying on purpose. Obviously, there’s a lot underneath that, but just stay with me a second. You have to focus in on the training, on what you want your people to do. What is our purpose? What is our value? What is the outcome, what is the job to be done? All those things salespeople do not wake up and go, Oh my God, today is such an amazing day. I get to data enter all day. They don’t say that. The second thing I know for sure is customers do not wake up and go today is a great day. I’m going from Stage Two to stage three in the buying journey. That’s all about us. It’s all about us, like Blake Shelton, right? It’s all about us, if you don’t think we focus on the right things as a leadership team, this stat will wake you up. Uh Oh, yep, sorry. Let me go to this. This stat, 54% of reps would not be willing to pay $1 for an hour of their manager’s time. How many of you have killer sales managers, and what are they doing, managing that process, managing the pipeline. What’s the forecast? How are we going to get there? What deals are stalling, and what happens is, as a sales rep, I’ve entered all this information into the CRM system, and then I sit down with my manager, and my manager starts saying, what deals are you working on? What’s happening in this deal? What’s your forecast and pipeline? And in my head, I’m going, Jesus. I spent four hours last night, updating everything in the CRM system, and my sales manager is wasting the only half hour of time I get all week asking me questions, where the answers are already in the CRM system. So why am I entering them in the CRM system? And then all of a sudden you have a utilization problem, and then you come to us and go, no one’s logging in. What are you going to do to help us? Yes, it’s like, well, walk me through your sales forecast meeting, and very quickly, I know you’ve just spent all this time talking to sales reps about the information that’s in the CRM system. So what it tells them is, don’t enter it into the CRM system, because they’re going to ask me the question anyway.

The Role of AI and Outcome-based Incentives in Sales

Nearly half of salespeople would rather go to the dentist than cold call. That goes back to that 100 calls, 10 people call you back. Three are going to set a meeting and one is going to buy I find it surprising no one raised their hand that people do this. 100 sales calls, whatever it is, 10 or 50 that you’re directing them. Here’s a list call this today. This is what I want you to do. I find it highly unlikely that nobody does that, because 80% of sales teams still do it. I was trained to do it in 1996 we’re still doing it today. And for a fun little trivia fact, since Nick asked, When was Patagonia founded? When do you think that demo selling that selling enough to make it to club. That value based selling and training. When do you think that was sort of conceptualized year t was in the late 1800s literally 1800s 18 sort of 95 ish, because it was Watson who worked at NCR, and they took cash registers out of the store and set up a demo facility, because people didn’t understand what the Cash Register would do if you were just telling them they had to show them, get them out of their business and show them. And of course, Watson went on to start IBM, and IBM, and you could, one could argue, in tech anyway, from about 1910 to the 1960s you didn’t get fired for buying IBM. It was the greatest sales force towards in the world. I’m not agreeing with that. I’m just saying what people have said late 1800s yet we still do the same things today. So that is the lack of a beginner’s mind.

So we have to think about these connection points. What are the connection points? This disconnection between teams? Specifically, we talk a lot about sales and marketing, but I want to extend that to extend that to sales, marketing and customer service. Do not forget about the customers you already have. If you’re in an as a service business, the leaky bucket of churn will get you every single time. So you can sell a lot in the top, you know your CAC numbers. You understand, for every dollar sold, you’re going to get this back, but then you can’t give me a story about churn, so you have to think about, how do we connect teams? The first place to start is connect it via metrics. What is the shared metrics between those teams? If marketing has a metric that is, how many leads did you give? Good or bad? Sales has a How much did you sell and customer services. How quickly did you get off the phone? In sort of two minutes? I can ask the question, do you run your call center as a cost center or as a revenue generation engine? And if you tell me a cost center, then these two things are out of whack. It has to be that you’re thinking about the post sales as a revenue generation engine.

If you don’t get those two things right, unfortunately, you have a disconnected experience like the example I gave, right? I’m a customer service agent. He calls in. I want to solve his problem. I have to log into five systems. I have a two minute SLA from my manager. You know, the warning comes up. I get called in after work and they go, you know, 50% of your calls today went longer than two minutes. What’s wrong? And you’re like, Well, nothing’s wrong. I’m just trying to serve the customer. I was trying to it took me eight minutes. How long it took me? I mean, I’m not chitter chattering about the weather. I’m trying to solve a customer’s problem. And so that experience will fall apart. So now, what does the future hold, let’s sort of look out 2025 What if advanced data science could help every sales organization find opportunities and turn them into revenue faster? 39% in our survey implemented AI based opportunity intelligence systems and became much greater at predictability and resilience in the business. So it can happen today. So what if you start to think that way? AI could dramatically augment the skills and productivity of every seller. Give them back some of that time on the 66% spent on non selling, give them a better shot at hitting. More your team hitting more than 54% on average of hitting quota attainment by letting the system start to automate and predict what happens in the sales cycle, so you can also get smarter in your forecast and pipeline accuracy. Instead of you walk in and go, Yep, I’m going to hit this number and you don’t really know, like I did. I walked in that week into the quarter, I knew we were going to miss it. If you are not sure you’re going to miss it, it means you just don’t have access to the information in the systems. And then what if we could focus less on next quarter’s quotas and more on delivering better outcomes and customer value.

So high performers have absolutely re thought about outcome based incentive models. So if there’s a sales rep who sells a million dollars, and I sell $750,000 and the million dollar seller goes to club in Hawaii, and I don’t get to go because I only sold $750,000 but yet, five months later, that million dollar book of business has become 750,000 and my $750,000 book of business has become 1.3 million. Who should have gone to club? Because once I sell the million and I go to club, I’m not thinking about that million dollars anymore, but yet, the $750,000 sales rep is thinking long term. So if you can figure out a way to incentivize across the lifetime value of a customer, you get a lot more connection between sales and the rest of the organization, but more importantly, in the goals.

The Future of Sales and the Importance of a Beginner’s Mind

So final thoughts, this is really what we’re going to talk about. I was often asked about that silver bullet, what can I do to improve sales this week, this quarter, this year, when I’m in the middle of a quarter, and it didn’t matter, from the very largest technology company in the world, which you can figure out who that is, who would say in quarter? Tiffani, we we’re going to miss our number. What should we do? Hire more salespeople, spend more marketing dollars, or cut our costs? And I was like, there has to be more than three levers to find growth. So I wrote a book called Growth IQ. Here were the 10 levers to growth, and you can see most of them I’ve sort of talked about a little bit today, but unconventional strategies at the top is purpose over profit. So that digs deep into that whole values deliver value conversation. It’s not one thing.

So this is really going to drive the workshop. But the first thing I want to share with you, on taking away what we’ve just talked about, is start with that beginner’s mind. What did you hear in that presentation that made you take pause? Write down one note if you got one thing out of the presentation, it was a success, but it requires you right to go: huh? Hadn’t thought about it that way. Or, you know what? I have thought about it, and maybe I haven’t had the courage or capability or the right team in place to do that, and now I do. Now I see that. You know, things are getting a little tricky. We got to figure out to be more resilient. A Beginner’s Mind will go a long way for you.

Empower your employees to serve your customers better. If your employees are struggling, your customers will struggle. If your employees aren’t happy, they’re not going to develop a great user interface. If your employees aren’t happy, they’re going to push products out before even MVP is ready. They’re just going to push it out. They’re going to do things because they just don’t care, and that’s why quiet, quitting is really scary. It’s worse for me than the great resignation. I’d rather have people leave. What if people stay and they’re disengaged? What if people stay and they’re not willing to go the extra mile? What if people stay and they’re in your product development teams, or they’re writing your FAQs, or they’re designing your website, and they’re not happy? We want to make sure that they can serve it.

Embrace change, reward ideas. Failure is your friend if you don’t have psychological safety, if you’ve read anything from Amy Edmondson, great stuff around psychological safety and what are the things that you can do that makes people feel if I try and I fail, I won’t lose my job. Now, if they just fail consistently because they’re not doing the work, that’s a different story. But you want them to iterate and learn right? Lean startup is about that whole sort of understanding that you have to rapidly iterate as you’re starting to learn. But the only way you can do that, and I think Steve Blank would agree is you would have to allow people to fail. Everybody plays a role in growth, not just the front line. Salespeople are not the Keepers for revenue. They are the ones who are responsible for the quota but everybody touches. If your legal department says we have to get these three things, and your sales department says we have to get these two things, and your executives say we need to get these one thing, and then all of a sudden, you add it up, and you are asking a customer for 14 things before they click buy. And in isolation, each of them go, Well, we’re only asking them to do this three but you don’t understand that all of that has impact into that entire journey.

So everybody touches growth, and then your differentiation is your mental model. Let me explain what I mean by that. How many of you remember Ted? The airline? Ted? Nobody remembers it. Yeah. Ok. So United started a discount airline to compete with Southwest, and called it Ted, like at the end of United Ted, Ted, they spent a lot of money getting that name. It’s probably a typo. Who knows? Anyway, so unite Ted, so it was just Ted, and they copied the hub and spoke model of Southwest, which, of course, was highly disruptive in the airline and transportation industry fair. Okay, so they copied it hub and spoke model, hub and spoke model. One person in this room remembered Ted, which means it’s not around anymore. Is southwest still here? Yes. What do you think the difference was between Southwest and Ted? You guys are going to have to play Yes, the mental model. How they do it, how they approach hiring, how they approach in flight service, how they approach baggage. What Ted did was applied hub and spoke to their existing mental model, which was not customer experience led. I’m not a united flyer. I’m an American Flyer in full transparency. So I can’t tell you if it’s a good experience or not, but ultimately that is the difference in the mental model. The mental model is how, why, the business model is hub and spoke. Nobody can copy your mental model, because you’re the only one that has your products, your employees and your culture, your openness to fail, your openness to have a beginner’s mind, your openness to say, I’m going to start with employees so I can serve my customers better.

That mental model is yours, and you when you go out to copy your competition or to defend what your competition is coming after you’re going after the business model. Don’t forget about the how and the why. That rounds out your ability to know and change starts with you, each of you in this room. If you don’t change, your managers won’t change. If your managers don’t change, your next level down, won’t change. And if they don’t change, your individual frontline contributors won’t change. This isn’t about talking about it. This is about actually changing comp, connecting and collaborating, fixing tools, getting rid of outdated technology, eliminating bad processes, using the data, surveying, looking at the information, iterating. You have to start to change the behavior, and trust me when I tell you the decisions you make today, like I started this presentation with the 111, model that started day one of Salesforce.

Mark’s joke is it was really easy when there was three employees, 1% of our time, 1% of our equity, we had none, and 1% of our software. No one was a customer. It was really easy to do it now and go back 22 years later and be like, Okay, we want to take this 1% pledge, which, by the way, there’s hundreds of companies, as was mentioned, Dropbox, Box, Twilio, they’ve all signed up. A lot of that is through Mark’s mentoring. But in order to change that culture to 111, you can’t just flip a switch like it’s a slow transition by team, by group, by division, by region, but it starts with you as leaders. You have to set the tone for what kind of organization you want to build, one that gives back, one that keeps it all, one that invests in customers only, or includes employees in that.

So if you’d like to keep in touch, there’s some free resources the growth that you can text growth IQ to that number. And I have a one of the thinkers, 50 members. I did something with the brightline Project Management Institute on innovation. You can join my newsletter. I’ve got a podcast called What’s Next. And then my book, Growth IQ, you can buy anywhere. And then I’ve got a new book coming out next year called The Experience Mindset, which talks about this mindset shift on the connection between employee and customer. So if you’d like to get the research, on the left is Forbes. In the middle is an HBR article that we did that actually showed a 50% improvement in store retail, employee production and productivity on revenue when the company started investing and improving on employee experience. And then the one on the right is the Edelman study, which was that global one that gave the list of the things that employees say versus things that the C suite says. So with that, I will thank you for the presentation part of this. I appreciate those of you that sort of played back on this, but so now I think we’re going to switch into Yes. All right, so thank you for that applause.

Q&A

So, all right, so the way we are going to do this, I still need the presentation up, if you don’t mind.

I’m just going to go through these really quickly, and then what we’re going to do is you’re going to put on the piece of paper which growth path you’re most interested in. I just don’t have enough time to go through all 10. And then any questions that you would have about customer experience, optimized sales, or anything I already talked about. But let’s start to the next to the right of customer experience, customer base penetration, selling more to your existing customers. I’m sure you all remember the commercials with cellular providers that said, if you call now, you can get five free phones, 7 trillion gigs of data for free, and we’ll come to your house and set it all up for you. But if you’re an existing customer, you get nothing.

So while we talk about the next one, you should all have post its enough, post its to write on and team and running around with pens. Just grab a pen if you want it. What we want you to do, I think, is, is put the title or the or the sector that you’d like to talk about up at the top of the post it note. And then if you’ve got any specific questions around that, write them in underneath. And then those are going to come back to the front, and they’re going to go up on this magic whiteboard, somewhat branded, and we’re going to pick out good ones. So do your stuff, BoS. All right.

So customer based penetration, selling more to those you have market acceleration, right? Accelerating in the current market with the current set of products that you have, product expansion should be self explanatory. And this should be sort of, you know, no surprise on these first ones, the ANSOFF matrix. What I did was I took that ANSOFF matrix and I modernized it using mobile, cloud, big data, AI, you know, all the things we now have at our disposal. So those first four should be fairly obvious, product expansion, customer and product diversification. We talked about optimized sales, right, taking your existing environment, and how do I optimize that engine to get more productivity, more revenue, greater value out of those teams, churn. I approach churn a little bit differently. I look at it as not being defensive. Like, what do you do if you lose customers to win them back? I approach churn as an offense. How do you stop them from leaving in the first place? Partnerships. So sell with and sell through partners, value added, resellers, systems integrators, something like the AppExchange, right ISVs developing around your technology. So that is partnerships.

Coopetition is working with someone you would usually view as a competitor, but partner with them to fill and round out your solution. So they may compete with you in 10% of the pie, but 90% you guys are actually additive, and you have similar sets of customers. So if you went at it together, could you have a better outcome? The best example of coopetition is the vaccines, competing pharmaceutical companies getting together to solve a big, hairy problem. They would not have done that in the past, normally, usually. So that is competition. And then unconventional strategies is absolutely using purpose as a way to recruit, attract talent to align your values with those customers that you currently have or those that you aspire to. Have any questions on the definitions, okay, so the exercise right down on the top which path you’d like to cover, and then any questions that you may have about the strategy. And now let me give you the framework of growth IQ. The first is understanding the context of your market. Who are your customers? Where do they buy? What do they value? Where are they shopping? Who do they go to? For information, you have to understand the context of the market.

So the example I give here is the following, if Netflix. I had started with streaming. Would it have worked? No, because we did not have high speed. We had DVDs and VHS players in our houses. It would have failed for the 1% that kind of had high speed at that time. So you have to understand the context of what your customers, your market, your situation, is able to do. The next is it is never one growth path. You will always combine multiple growth paths, and the sort of three that are always in place are customer experience, optimized sales and customer base penetration, right selling into your customers get better at generating revenue with optimized sales and delivering a compelling customer experience. If you have those three foundationally, you might add product expansion or customer diversification, right? You can bolt on top of those. So it is a ripple effect of multiple growth paths, not all 10, and not all of them at the same time. And that’s where the Achilles heel of the growth IQ framework comes into visibility, and that is sequence, the order in which you do things has meaningful and measurable impact in your ability to be successful. Growth IQ is filled with 30 case studies. There’s three case studies per path, two positive use cases of the growth path.

One cautionary tale. In this case, I will use McDonald’s as an example. In the US, McDonald’s decided to do all day breakfast that, by the way, customers had been asking for for like, 15 years. And finally, the new CEO went, I have an idea, let’s sell all day breakfast, because our best selling item is an English muffin, you know, Egg McMuffin. So let’s do that. And everyone would, oh, that’s a great idea. No one was listening to the customer. That’s for another conversation. But they could not if they made the decision on Friday, they couldn’t turn on all day breakfast on Monday. Why not? You cannot cook burgers and eggs at the same temperature. So you cannot cook them on the grill at the same time. So you actually need two grills, which meant they had to reorganize all the kitchens get 3500 franchisees to agree. If they had just pulled the plug, it would have failed.

So if you think about context, what does the market want? Combination? I’m going to expand a product into an existing base of customers and maybe attract people who finish work, you know, at six o’clock at night and actually want breakfast. And then the sequence, the order in which you do it, you have to fix the kitchen before you launch the product. You have to get the call center in place before you launch the product. You need to put partners and have them trained and certified in place before you sell through partners. That is sequence. Those three things are the answer. So with that, if that was helpful, I will go back to the slide that has them on it while Mark’s doing that. Does anybody have a question for my presentation? You can just raise your hand and I can answer.

Audience member: We had a big impact on revenue growth by changing pricing is and pricing is not specifically up there? Is it embedded in one of those?

Tiffani Bova: So the question was, we changed, we got growth specifically from changing price. I’m not a fan of changing price because you’re just trying to improve revenue, but if you all of the sudden, right, have increased value, you’ve added more things. So for example, when I wrote the book. So not of recent, but Netflix increased its prices, and churn went down and acquisition went up. When it raised its prices, because they had more content or more original content, they were offering more things, right? Consumer felt there was more value. I’m willing to pay more money. Now it’s gotten much more saturated. Disney plus grew actually, faster than Netflix did in its early days, and Netflix is now in a little bit of churn problem, and acquisition is not happening as quickly and fast, and also a lot of saturation. But that dial of changing the price works if you’re adding value for the additional price, if you’re adding the additional price because you have a revenue problem. I’m not saying you do right, but if you’re doing that, it may backfire to you as soon as customers realize I’m paying more for the same thing, I’m going to go shop. Let’s be clear. Yeah, you could use it for market acceleration, right? You could say I’m trying to accelerate growth, and so I want to accelerate with the existing product, so you change price in the existing product, and so that might be where you would place it. Yep, alrighty. So what do we have? Oh, yes. Sorry, we got one more question.

Audience member: Just in spirit of mental models, and you talk about the experience mindset being the next book, I was wondering if you’d give us 60 seconds of your current thinking on extending from you make stuff and build stuff to you make stuff. You build stuff, you deliver an experience, as opposed to the product.

Tiffani Bova: And that’s a great question. So I don’t know if I can do it in 60 seconds, but I will do my best. I. And I would say that in the future, the goal would be that when you make improvements for the customer, that you consider the employee. So let me give you an example if you think about two axis. If this is customer experience and this is employee experience, you know, the first industrial revolution, second industrial revolution, third industrial revolution, we got into automation, productivity, output, everything around it’s capitalism. It’s like getting more from the same dollar. If we pay someone a little bit more, they’ll do a little bit more work, right? We were playing with those dials about 15 years ago. We started to make investments to improve customer experience, which really is reduce effort for the customer to increase their experience, right? I don’t have to click nine times. I click three times. It’s I can do it on a nap. I don’t have to go in someplace, right? The effort went down and the experience went up. Unfortunately, the research showed that as we did that for customers, effort going down, experience going up, the effort for employees went up, and the experience went down. And so if you think about those lines, right, you would want it to sort of go like this, like an Uber experience, high effort, low for customer, it’s really low for us as well. You know, from a customer stand, if you were a driver, it’s the same app, you know what I mean. So the experience stayed fairly close together. And so those two things got disconnected. So it’s if you make a decision for the customer, what’s the intended or unintended consequence on the employee side, that’s the thought of the mindset shift today. We just tend to only focus on customer. We don’t think about employees. Hence why there’s 900 apps and only 29% of them are integrated. Ok? What do we got

Mark Littlewood: By some margin, Partnerships, biggest group of questions, then it comes in as Unconventional Strategies and Optimize Sales, are the next two. So why don’t we start with partnerships? Some sample questions: how to start? I really like that. It’s a sort of open question. There are a number around: how do you get to partner with someone that’s bigger than you? And other things, partner with several leading enterprise orgs, but they won’t sell the product our way, and as a result, seeing limited success, how do we course correct their sales strategy when they’re not open to feedback bad people?

Tiffani Bova: All right, yep, easy enough. So, as luck would have it, my area of coverage at Gartner was actually indirect channel strategies. So I know a little bit about this topic. So I would say to you that partnerships are about your customer being able to get a more comprehensive solution than they would get if they were only working with you. Secondarily, are you going to hire 100 salespeople?

Let me back up a second. So when I was selling software, it was in 1996 and that was the only sales rep for a small little software company who sold to the legal tech community, and we were a sort of a search company, Boolean search early this is literally there wasn’t sort of the internet as it is today. And I was reading a magazine, law, technology, product news, and I saw a full page ad for a company that said, we are a value added reseller. And I’m like, I don’t even know what that is. That is like. I didn’t know what var meant. I didn’t know what it stood for. And then I realized, wait a second, I can partner with these guys, and they have 50 sales reps, and they can go sell my product on my behalf, and I’m one salesperson banging the phone for 100 calls. 10 call you back, three that whole process. And I went, Wait a second so I can go recruit them. And now all of a sudden, I get 50 salespeople talking about my software versus just me, and I was the only salesperson. I did that one deal, and we went from about 80,000 a month to a little over 300,000 a month. And then I got another partner, and we went from $300,000 a month to $600,000 a month. And by the way, this was not an as a service business, because that wasn’t around then this was a one time use case, deploy. How many seats do you have? That’s how many licenses we’re selling. Was a very SPLA Microsoft sort of esque.

So that partnership will give you reach into customers, give you scale and sales people. So if you only have three salespeople, and you could carve one off to go find a partner or two that they can manage, and they have 20 or 30 salespeople, and they’re representing your product, you now have 20 or 30 people talking about your product. Now the question back is, okay, but they don’t sell the way we sell. How do we make sure they know what they’re doing? That requires some form of program. How do you recruit them? How do you train them? How do you support them? But ultimately, I’ll just give you two examples. Cisco sells 96% of everything they sell, every dollar they sell, goes through partners, Microsoft, until I joined here, because I don’t know what the numbers are. Now I don’t pay. Attention. But they had 600,000 partners, 180,000 of them globally are active, and that was responsible. This is pre office 365 was about 95% of their revenue. You cannot go to cisco.com and buy anything. You have to buy through a partner. So those strategies will give you scale. And if you’re small, it’s a great way to figure out what do customers want and need from you. So one of the other things was, did that answer the how to get started? So the second is, where to who is the partner you want? The best thing for me to advise you is go into your existing customer base and ask them what partners and other technology they’re working with, because then they’re already in those accounts. And so if they’re already working with partners, who are they? You could approach those partners and go, Look, I have 10 customers who are using you. I’d love for you to represent our technology as well. What would we need to do to make that happen and don’t show up with a fully baked program. Maybe design it and architect it in collaboration with that partner.

Start small, learn, extend if you want to get out of the US. An easy way to do it is to partner to do it. So if you think about, sort of any of the most successful tech companies in the world. You very quickly will see, if you’re familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle at Tech trigger, it’s a founder selling to a CIO. As you start to get to the top of this, and you get more and more customers, and you’re in that absolute hype. You start thinking about hiring salespeople when you hit the trough of disillusionment, which is this sort of part of the hype cycle right here. This is where partnerships are really good. And then by the time you get to long tail, you have a direct and indirect strategy. It might be two partners, three partners. I’m not saying it has to be as big as a Cisco or Microsoft. Even if you look at us, we don’t have a resale program. We have an ISV program. We now have had, I don’t know, I think it’s like 9 million downloads of apps out of the App Exchange customers that need extended capability on our technology happens through and with partners. So it’s a great way to extend your reach.

Mark Littlewood: Great. So let’s move on to unconventional. I mean, we’re not going to cover all of these, but unconventional strategies really interesting question, how do you come up with these?

Tiffani Bova: So this is a personal story. When I was leaving Gartner, I was fortunate enough to have, you know, a handful of very large tech companies offer me positions. And I said, you know, the sort of my role is literally to do what I was doing at Gartner, but do it for Salesforce and do it for our customers in the market. It’s a it’s pretty much the exact same role. And when it came down to it, it wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t about what, what sort of my sphere of control was going to be. It was literally, I had been to 10 dreamforces, and it was the only tech conference I’d ever attended where I left wanting to be a better human being, because the culture is all about purpose over profit. I mean, if you’ve ever heard anything we say, and if you’ve ever been to Dreamforce, the entire first day is not about product, it’s about how the product is really empowering people to make incredible impact in the oceans, in our world, in in hunger, in education, in diversity, whatever it might be. So I felt like purpose and values was a growth lever that people were not paying attention to. And I think Nick proved it really well, right? Small company, 12 years start, at the beginning, wanted to be purpose. B Corp, all the things he’s doing really shows that if you align to the values and purpose as an organization, you will attract talent. You will attract customers.

And so unconventional strategies was in that particular chapter, I was looking for, what’s the next freemium model in my head? I was like, what’s the next freemium model? Right? Because that changed SaaS forever, and Mark was one of the first to do it. I was looking for what was next, like freemium, and it was like, right in front of me, and it became this sort of purpose over profit. So that’s sort of the personal story of why I chose that growth path, but also why I joined, why I chose to join Salesforce and not go somewhere else.

Mark Littlewood: We’ll take one more so many around optimizing sales. Those are fine. Usually, sales is really managed marketing is really managed marketing and finance. How does sales management wrestle control back?

Tiffani Bova: Great question. So if you remember the slide, it was about wrestling sort of control back. This is not about ownership. This is about collaboration. If you’re a leader and you’re trying to rally back ownership of budget and headcount and assets and all those things, you’ve missed the point. It has to be, what are the team collaboration points. I don’t want you to break down silos. I want you to build bridges between various teams, and the bridge is collaboration. Next, align around metrics that all groups can agree upon, and then third, understand how those things actually have impact on the customer experience. As I said, if you have a call center that’s on how fast you can get a customer off the line, and you have marketing talking about leads, and, you know, doesn’t matter good or bad, and sales is like, you know, I’m just going to sell it whether the customer needs it or not, because I’m trying to retire quota, you end up in a really bad situation. You churn very quickly. You don’t have sort of collaboration across teams. Your customers feel like they’re dealing with different companies versus a single company, it gets ugly really, really quickly. So if you’re trying to quote, unquote, wrestle control back, understand what is happening that’s not working, and then start to have a collaborative leadership conversation about what are the things we can do to break up this disconnection and pull it closer together, all in the spirit of the customer. If you use an “I” “me”, “I want”, start with the customer, but also start with the employee. What is the experience for a salesperson if it’s so disconnected and they’re not having a good experience? And so if you can comment from those two angles, it’s not a conversation about control, budget, sphere of influence.

That kind of C suite, ego conversation will not go very far. I had 25 conversations with customers that chose not to buy from us, and I had 25 conversations with customers who recently bought from us. And I had 25 conversations with customers who have been with us for a year or longer. And here were the common three themes, and you can listen to all of them if you’d like to. I had it transcribed, and here were the three themes, and you show up with a here is what our customers are saying. Is not working. That goes a much longer way then I think this is what we should be doing, because it will give me back control, and I will have the resources, and I will be responsible for the quota and the budget like that is not that. Is not the way forward if you’re trying to course correct, and if you’re if anything in what I said today resonates with you, and you don’t know how to get your leaders to agree. That’s the way to do it. Ask the same questions from your employees. Ask the same questions for your customers. Show up with data and say, here’s what I heard. What can we do to fix it? I thought of it. I came up with these three things, but let’s all go and workshop. What are the things to fix it? Now, it’s not you. I me, it’s a customer and employee expects us to do these things.

Mark Littlewood: I think that’s a great place to wrap up, unfortunately, but there are a bunch of other questions here. One of the things that gives me some degree of excitement and comfort is quite a lot of them are going to be covered by other people in the in the conference. It’s almost like someone’s put some thought into what was supposed to be. So, hey, don’t know who it is. Yeah. So there’s a there’s a bunch of things around pricing, about customer penetration, choosing the right products to sell. How to accelerate when you’ve got complex messaging, simplify it.

Tiffani Bova: Yeah, and I would say to you, listen, I’m literally I’m not exaggerating. I’ve had five in my Gartner days. I had 5000 conversations over the course of a decade with startups, small businesses, medium and large enterprises. These 10 cover everything I ever got asked, and whether you’re small or large, large organizations are grappling with complex messaging. Small organizations are grappling with complex messaging. Large organizations are grappling with pricing and the great resignation. Small you’re all dealing with the same things. The difference is how much budget you have, how many people you have, and the risk equation that you’re dealing with, but know that you’re not alone. You know, this is not about going and buying my book, although that would be great. It’s let’s keep in touch. Drop me, you know, follow me on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter or Instagram, and, you know, drop me a note on on something that really resonated with you or something you absolutely did not agree with I love hearing that as well, because it helps shape what I say on stage the next time. But I so appreciate your willingness to participate and fill all these out, and thanks to the business of software team for having my pleasure.

Mark Littlewood: And if someone here comes up with a new question for you, let me know, because they get a free ticket next year, right?

Tiffani Bova: All right. Thank you very much.

Mark Littlewood: Thank you so much. You.

Tiffani Bova

Global Growth & Innovation Evangelist, Salesforce

Tiffani is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce and the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business. Bova has been named to the latest Thinkers50’s list of the world’s top management thinkers and is a welcomed guest on Bloomberg, BNN, Cheddar, MSNBC, and Yahoo Finance, among others. She also contributes her thinking to publications including Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Diginomica, Quora, Thrive, Rotman School of Management and Duke Dialogue Review.

She is a change maker who’s thought-provoking and forward-thinking insights have made her a frequent guest on a variety of industry-leading podcasts and live broadcasts.

As host of What’s Next! with Tiffani Bova, an iTunes’ all-time business and management bestseller and a top sales podcast according to Top Sales Magazine, Bova has interviewed a growing number of exceptional humans including Arianna Huffington, Chester Elton, Dan Pink, Ginger Hardage, Bonin Bough, Mark Victor Hansen, Seth Godin and Tom Peters.

Bova is a top Twitter influencer in Business Growth, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, the Future of Work, and Sales. She was named one of Inc. Magazine’s 37 Sales Experts You Need to Follow on Twitter, a LinkedIn Top Sales Expert to follow in 2018, 2019 and 2020, a Top 100 Women in Tech, a Brand Quarterly Magazine Top 50 Marketing.

More from Tiffani.

Next Events

BoS Europe 2025 🇬🇧

🗓️ 31 March – 1 April 2025
📍 Cambridge, UK

Spend time with other smart people in a supportive community of SaaS & software entrepreneurs who want to build great products and companies.

Save your Spot

BoS USA 2025 🇺🇸

🗓️ To be announced soon
📍 Raleigh, NC

Learn how great software companies are built at an extraordinary conference run since 2007 to help you build long term, profitable, sustainable businesses.

More Details