REALLY Know Your Customer

Betsy and Tony talk to Eddy Badrina about building his business and making a positive impact. Eddy has humbly worked his way from the George W. Bush administration to starting, selling, and buying back digital marketing agency, BuzzShift. His latest venture is leading Eden Green Technology as CEO.  

Prior to joining Eden Green Technology, Eddy knew he wanted his next venture to have three key components:  

1. A hardware or software component,  

2. Exponential impact and  

3. Be a redemptive organization.  

To achieve this, Eddy has clearly articulated what he wants as a leader and then hired people smarter than him. He focused on Eden Green’s 10X key differentiator, a concept originally coined by Peter Thiel. What is it that his organization truly does ten times better than his competitors? Listen in to find out more. 

On this episode, Chris Kuenne joins Betsy and Tony to share his 30+ year journey that started at Johnson & Johnson as a Franchise Marketing Director. He has since launched and sold a customer marketing business to Publicis for over $600MM. Chris also teaches a High Tech Entrepreneur course at Princeton University. His most recent stop on his entrepreneurial (and philanthropic) journey is at Rosemark, where he and his team are building quantitative personas as a method of measuring relationships between customers and brands.

For most big brands, NPS is a good way to start a marketing story, but it’s just one chapter. Important decisions should not be made based on over-listening to the results from one customer (who could be unprofitable); instead, Rosemark creates a bigger picture to help tell the full story, and more importantly, predict future purchase behaviors. 

“This is not customer satisfaction at all costs. It’s customer satisfaction among those customers who are aligned with your brand proposition.”

Nicole Glenn joins the podcast to describe her career path from the retail industry to a passionate entrepreneur and owner of Candor Expedite, a top woman-owned business in the transportation industry. Though Nicole shares that she never felt ready to be an entrepreneur, she has truly found her passion creating positive customer experiences and an engaging company culture that includes everything from happy hours to badass thank you cards and messages. Did we mention Candor Expedite has also doubled their growth in 2021? Listen in as Nicole talks about the importance of understanding customer expectations.

Join us for a conversation with Jay Haynes, CEO of thrv, the first and only jobs-to-be-done product management software, which is based upon the foundational work of Clayton Christensen. At the heart of everything Jay and thrv do, is customer centricity. As humans, our goals don’t change over time. For example, the need to get from point A to point B. It’s how we use technology to accomplish the steps in between that has changed.

B2B companies love to chase technology: AI, blockchain, APIs, but from Jay’s perspective, customers don’t care about the technology. They only care if the technology helps get the job done faster. Think about maps. In a very short time, we’ve gone from paper maps, to GPS, to a free phone app to get us from point A to point B. If your product takes more than pushing a button to get the job done, you should constantly ask why because you could be delivering a bad customer experience. This simple example demonstrates really knowing your customer and what they are struggling with on a daily basis.

Jay also touches on moving away from the model of “shareholders over everything else” in an effort to be more customer centric, allowing customers to develop their product roadmap.

Meet Ed Vincent, founder of festivalPass, the world's first live events subscription service across music, film, food and wine, sports, theater, tech innovation and more. Betsy Westhafer and Tony Bodoh excitedly talk about how this model changes customer experience! For a long time, concert-goers and show-watchers have been trained to be subject to crazy convenience fees and surcharges for each performance. But now, users can enjoy thousands of events locally and globally for one monthly fee.

Ed talks about the desire to build a community around the $200B live event industry to make things easy, social and frictionless for his customers. While data is a huge part of their business, his approach is not something we’ve discussed on the podcast before. Ed covers four fundamentals needed to really make a marketplace successful:

1. Root vs global density
2. Hetero vs. homogeneous inventory
3. Inverse Volume Price (1 high/1 low)
4. Reason to come back

He is also generous enough to share his untraditional methods to raise capital.

What does this all mean and how can it help grow your business? Listen to find out more!

We’ve all been there. The aggravation of calling into a customer service line with a problem that you have to explain over and over again, wasting your time and energy. Even nice humans like Betsy and Tony see red during these interactions. Enter Peter Voss and AIGO. 

From a garage to a company of over 400 people, Peter has seen it all (and researched it all) over the past 20 years of his career in AI. AIGO is committed to creating chatbots with brains and bringing hyper-personalization into the world of AI. Think about having a dedicated concierge service that actually remembers you and any previous interactions you’ve had with them. How much time would you save as a customer? What if your organization had technology like this for your customers to deliver a better brand experience? For Peter, the answers to these questions lie in the technology at AIGO. 

This episode is for tech geeks and customer-focused execs alike - listen now!

Lucas is the Co-Founder and CEO of INFI, a tech company that specializes in mobile apps, point-of-sale kiosks, and marketing services for QSR & Franchises. Lucas joined the hospitality industry in the most unexpected way – through a karaoke bar! Over the next several years, he found a way to combine two of his biggest passions of engineering and restaurants by forming INFI, where he and the INFI team could improve digitalization in the restaurant industry.

The customer and the customer’s customers are at the heart of everything Lucas works on. Whether it’s mom and pop restaurants or larger franchises, most restaurants have similar opportunities and challenges. They need to be busy. They need a website presence. They need favorable reviews. Restaurants should position themselves to be Key Opinion Leaders (KOL) or local influencers if they do everything right.

Lucas and INFI believe restaurants should stay focused on human elements, which includes creating great food and drinks and keeping customers coming back. If you’re looking for ways to become more than a transactional provider, this episode is a must-listen.

In this episode, Betsy and Tony chat with Kim Moceri, Operating Partner at Francisco Partners. Kim starts off by explaining her career path, which includes taking a tactical support organization to a consultative business focused on the customers’ outcomes. In Kim’s current role, she is responsible for getting her 50-60 portfolio companies to understand the impact of strategic customer success. To get to the core, each company’s focus must be top-down and outside-in. Lastly, Kim focuses on the difference between customer success (i.e., realizing business outcomes) and account management (tactical aspects, such as customer renewals).

Listen into this episode with two brand new guests – Betsy and Tony! As two CEOs, they dive into what has driven their careers and businesses forward. Tony’s business focuses on a bottom-up approach and Betsy’s business focuses on a top-down approach. They meet somewhere in the middle to discuss how to better engage with customers. They also explore predictions for the next 3-5 years as it relates to CEO behaviors and strategies. Don’t miss this episode of the REALLY Know Your Customer Podcast!

Business growth is unattainable if you don’t engage with the very people that drive it: the customers. Kristy Knichel is a 24-year veteran of the transportation and logistics industry who understands that listening to your customers is the number one way to grow your business. She is the CEO of Knichel Logistics, a WBENC-Certified Business Enterprise (national certification for women-owned businesses) with serious growth goals in the next three to five years. In this episode, she joins Betsy Westhafer and Tony Bodoh to share some customer engagement strategies that can drive your business to the next level. Kristy’s ability to roll up her sleeves during times of turmoil (such as the pandemic) has led to stronger engagement in Knichel’s workforce and within her customer base. Join her in this conversation to learn how she did that and more!