REALLY Know Your Customer

Meet Denise Freier. After more than 40 years of driving sales and customer relationships at IBM, Denise made her way to the Strategic Account Management Association. At its core, SAMA is focused on sharing best practices for, you guessed it, Strategic Account Managers. Whether it’s through conferences, free webinars or training services, SAMA is continually finding new ways to help accelerate the member’s business results.

So, what’s the difference between sales and strategic account management? Denise explores this with Tony and Betsy and views your traditional salesperson as someone who can apply products and services to a customer’s problem. Whereas strategic account managers develop long-term trust and commitment with customers, while always leading with the customer’s success. Listen in to learn the 5 specific traits that make a SAM.

We especially love this episode given Denise also wrote the foreword in Betsy and Tony’s next book! The Rarest Advantage: How to Co-Create Strategic Value to Retain and Expand Your Key Customer Accounts will be released in April 2022.

Meet Gal Oron. Gal is a self-described normal person who got to where he is with a lot of hard work and constant improvement. Whether it’s on the basketball court or in the office, Gal strives to keep three key things in mind: 1. Have humility 2. Exhibit strong work ethic 3. Be dedicated.

At Zoomin, Gal and his team are replicating the successes they’ve seen in B2C, and bringing them into the B2B world of enterprise companies. Today, every company is a tech company. That means companies need to understand how their end users interact with content and how they can use this data to their benefit. That’s where Zoomin comes into play. Zoomin will reveal the blind spots in your customer experience.

Listen in as Gal humbly shares his expertise in this can’t-miss episode.

Transparency across the organization - it’s something every business strives for, but few master. Customer conversations or feedback is often diluted from the point it enters the organization to when (or should we say, IF) it reaches the impacted department. Fathom, a #1-rated Zoom app, is working to change that.  

The CEO of Fathom, Richard White joins Betsy and Tony to talk about the business value his company is bringing to a remote-first environment. Customer conversations that take place virtually can now be captured and shared across the organization in a way that increases productivity for everyone involved, improves internal alignment and ultimately, yields a better customer experience.  

Richard gives the REALLY Know Your Customer listeners a special Fathom offer! Tune in for more information. 

Darshan Mehta’s time and passion for research goes back to the 1990s, when he became interested in case studies and customer focus groups. Today, Darshan is CEO of iResearch, which built an online insights platform that enables companies to quickly, easily, and affordably extract insights from consumers or employees worldwide. In other words, Darshan saw the value extracted from in-person focus groups and created a way to leverage some of that same value using an online methodology.

Let’s dive into this insightful conversation with Darshan and explore the world of customer focus groups.

Slater Victoroff never thought he would grow up to be an entrepreneur, even though he was exactly that from an early age, selling individual Dum Dums that he had bought in bulk to his friends (with a nice markup). Fast forward to today, and Slater is the former CEO-turned current CTO of Indico Data. With a focus on helping their customers do their job in a more fulfilling way, Indico processes unstructured data such as audio files, contracts, invoices, applications, etc.

Join us for a conversation that takes a turn into really deep thinking around humans and data.

Ross Rich was part of an outdated industry running the same playbook from 30 years ago. A move across the country landed him at Stripe where he helped grow the business from a self-serve model of 250 employees to a sales-led organization with over 7,000 employees. He shares how much he learned at Stripe and what became obvious to him: the market was missing a customer-facing collaboration platform for B2B sales. More specifically, one that would build a repeatable sales motion for companies that were rapidly growing.

From there, he and his brother got the idea for Accord. They have a keen understanding about a salesperson's point of view (including what they’re willing to do and what you’ll never get them to do) and they designed the platform accordingly to create transparency between a buyer and sales.

Listen in for this episode to hear more, including our favorite quote from the episode: “Buyers don’t know how to buy."

Alex joins Betsy and Tony to talk about proper key account management. He shares his entrepreneurial journey and what he refers to as the “classic startup pivot”. About a decade ago, he formed Kapta, originally a Human Resources software business turned key account management platform. The pivot occurred after the Kapta team simply spoke to their customers. They initiated the customer discovery process and learned the customers weren’t struggling with HR software as much as visibility into customer accounts. There was nowhere to capture key account strategies, track their goals, and understand if a customer was healthy or at risk.  

Alex shares insights during this episode about the difference between key account strategy (“We are customer-centric.”) and key account tactics: Knowledge of Customer, Actions based on knowledge, Measure Impact.  

That brings us to KAMCon. Kapta’s annual conference designed for practitioners in the field who want to better understand the art and science of account management.  

SPECIAL OFFER: Listen to this episode and receive the discount code for KAMCon that Alex so graciously offers our audience - $150 off the April 2022 conference registration! 

Howard Tiersky, CEO and Founder of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency has been working on big brands’ digital strategies before they were even on the internet. Over the past 30 years, Howard has become an expert in digital transformation and launched his own business 15 years ago, which now employs about 100 people. Howard shares his story about the company culture and the critical role the leadership team plays in setting the tone for the organization.

FROM is solely focused on (humbly) helping their clients drive customer behavior. If you can get your customers to do what you want them to do (customer experience), you’re going to have a great business. Howard talks through the concept of how experience is what drives thoughts and feelings, and thoughts and feelings are what drive customer behavior (i.e., purchasing your product).

Grab your notebook and pen before you listen into this episode that Betsy and Tony are raving about.

During this episode, Jackie talks to Betsy and Tony about her unexpected path to owning a successful Information Technology solutions company. From an entry-level position where she forgot to save her work on her first day (oops), to running a company with 150 employees, Jackie has stayed laser-focused on customers. Listen in to find out three critical things business owners should consider as they launch their business.

The other half of the conversation is focused on how employee (and customer) loyalty is a two-way street. JYG chose their employees and her employees chose JYG everyday by showing up to work. In a digital/remote world, face-to-face time with her employees is still an important aspect of maintaining the company culture and taking care of her #1 customers (the employees).

Lesley Bielby is back. She recently returned to creative marketing agency, DiMassimo Goldstein (DiGo), for the third time in her career. This time, she joins the team as Co-CEO and Chief Strategy Officer. Lesley shares her global career journey with Tony and Betsy, which includes major marketing agencies in cities like London, New York and Boston.

DiGo recently redesigned their strategy to solely focus on positive behavior change in every part of their business: their clients, their employees and their culture. With this in mind, Lesley talks about having to pass on opportunities that no longer align with their mission of positive behavior change. An admittedly hard thing to do for any business.

Dive into this episode as Lesley shares the “3 M’s” customer journey strategy where her team looks at every customer using the 3 M’s: motivation, momentum, and moments that matter.