Claim OwnershipREALLY Know Your Customer
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Growing the company. It’s the CEO’s #1 priority. And yet oftentimes a gap exists between the strategies of the CEO and the demands of customers. This strategic gap slows growth and erodes your competitive edge while exposing your organization to unnecessary risks. By gaining a deep awareness and understanding of this chasm, CEOs can lead the charge to align the strategy, promises and experience to gain customer loyalty and advocacy and eliminate the friction that can open the door for a mass exodus to the competitor.If you’re in the C-Suite and concerned about the growth and velocity of your company, REALLY Know Your Customer is the podcast for you. Let Betsy Westhafer and Tony Bodoh be your guides to show you how to close the strategic gap that exists between your company and your customers. With insights from experienced executive-level guests, this podcast will change the way you think as a leader and will challenge your views on how to build a winning strategy supported by operations and tactics that leverage your key customer relationships. Betsy Westhafer is a best selling author, speaker, and the CEO of The Congruity Group, a consultancy helping B2B C-Suites expand trusted customer relationships so they can ensure the future of their high-growth organizations. Through the deployment of executive-level Customer Advisory Boards, Betsy helps Congruity clients gain the critical insights they need to mitigate the risks associated with: client attrition and market share loss, ineffective strategies and business models, reputation damage from dissatisfied customers, industry disruption, misaligned business models, irrelevance in the market, and counterproductive organizational dynamics. Throughout her career, Betsy has led confidential C-Suite conversations around the world, including in the US, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, diving into customer perception gaps, market trends, and innovation. She helps clients uncover insights into where customers need them to be in order to achieve mutual success, all while strengthening key customer relationships to minimize the gap between their own strategies and the strategies of their customers. Tony Bodoh is an expert in human experience. He is the CEO of the customer experience consultancy, Tony Bodoh International, and has co-founded four other companies. He works with startups and world-renowned brands to align their strategies, promises, and experiences which enables accelerated customer acquisition and significant improvements in customer retention. Three of his books have been on more than twenty of Amazon’s Best Seller lists, and his training programs are used across the Americas, Europe and Asia. Tony balances the ability to invent new forms of data analysis to discover insights with his ability to coach leaders through the transformation of their mindsets and the culture of their organizations. Drawing on the experiences of top-level (C-Suite) executives who have cracked the code when it comes to leveraging customer relationships to align their brand’s strategy, promises, and experiences, this podcast will challenge you and provoke new thinking. Learn from the best practices and biggest mistakes of high-level, knowledgeable, confident, and experienced C-Suite guests. Hang out with the best and brightest to accelerate your organization’s growth. Let us help you explore new ways to nurture those key customer relationships so you can continue your high-growth trajectory and build your customer base into the future. In this quickly evolving business environment, you could be a high-growth company today and gone tomorrow. Disruption is a given and no organization is immune. The market is so dynamic that relying on the status quo is a recipe for extinction. The best way to ensure sustainability is to deeply understand what your customers need, want, and expect from your organization today and in the future. Join Betsy Westhafer and Tony Bodoh and their guest experts here on REALLY Know Your Customer. We are here to help.
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Lamees Butt joins Betsy and Tony on this episode to delve into the topics of digital transformation and the ever-evolving landscape of commerce. She shares her insights on the challenges faced during her journey, including the importance of failing fast and adapting, which eventually led her to the corporate world. Now a key player at Zoovu, an AI commerce platform, she focuses on connecting businesses with their customers, making it easier to find products in the vast digital market. Through real-life examples with industry giants like Vodafone, Dyson, and Bosch, she illustrates the complexities of the B2C sector and the inevitable changes coming in B2B transactions. Lamees sheds light on Zoovu's customer-centric approach, involving partnerships with top customers through Customer Advisory Boards, fostering a community where thought leadership and experiences are shared. This collaborative ecosystem of customers and partners is seen as pivotal to Zoovu's growth, proving that in the ever-changing world of digital commerce, strong partnerships and customer-centric strategies are the keys to success.Tune in and hear more from Lamees, Betsy and Tony on this episode.
Meet Jay Meyer. Jay is an accomplished business owner and entrepreneur who shares his personal journey of addiction and recovery on this insightful episode with Betsy and Tony. With decades of business and leadership under his belt, Jay has seen a lot change over the years, but one thing has remained: his desire to get to know his customers. Jay started his career by building authentic relationships with his customers, being curious, taking them to lunch, and caring for his customers’ families. He has taken these practices along his journey because of the impact he wants to make in others’ lives. Jay shares the ways he consistently maintains his positive spirit and how he is driven to live out his personal mission to “inspire others, dream more, be more, and live in the light more.”
Meet Mark Ross-Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of StatusMatch.com. Mark joins Betsy and Tony on the podcast from Malaysia. As a self-proclaimed professional frequent flyer, Mark racked up more airline points than you can imagine as he built his former businesses. After he decided to move across the world, he asked the area’s major airline for a status match in their frequent flyer program. He was denied, but it led the way for his idea to create StatusMatch.com. Tony, Betsy, and Mark dive into emotional loyalty to big brands and discuss how those micro-moments can be replicated in any size business to get a leg up on the competition.
Join us for a conversation with Prashant Fuloria, CEO of Fundbox, a working capital platform for small businesses. Did you know that 82% of small business failures are because of a cash flow gap or a working capital challenge? That’s where Fundbox comes in: to create solutions that level the playing field for small businesses and help them succeed. Although automation and user simplicity is essential to their product development, customer engagement is critical to the Fundbox mission to provide relevant solutions that help their customers focus on growing their business. It’s clear that Prashant is passionate about what he does and making a difference for his customers. Listen in to learn more!
Meet Tony Sternberg, Co-Founder & CEO of ProsperStack, an automated retention platform for subscription businesses. Consider this: You’ve had it up to “here” with your streaming service and you call to cancel your subscription. ProsperStack partners with said streaming service to create a unique retention strategy for what happens next after you live chat or call the provider. It’s unique because the next subscriber will encounter a different experience based on their individual attributes, such as how long they’ve been a customer or how frequently they utilize the service. ProsperStack integrates this data to give the providers deeper insights around customer retention. Tony Sternberg is leading the charge for this fast-growing company and bringing a new light to how to really know your customer.
Meet Gail and Bruce Montgomery. They are the high-energy co-founders of ExperienceYes, a truly one-of-a-kind business, set out to bring fun into organizations that want to improve trust, relationship-building, and EQ to make higher-performing teams. With similar backgrounds in professional acting, singing, and dancing in New York City, they both made their way into the corporate world. Gail and Bruce found a way to bring these two very different worlds together in 2013 when they launched ExperienceYes. In this episode, Gail and Bruce generously share their 4 rules for improving the customer experience using Improv. 4 Rules for Improving Customer Experience (using Improv)1. Say “yes, and” more.2. Listen with the intent to learn and serve. 3. Support teammates at all costs. 4. Trust your instincts.The goal of their sessions is to use applied Improv to make you uncomfortable (in a safe space), so you can start getting comfortable during ambiguity. And laughter. A lot of laughter.
Meet Jochem van der Veer, Co-Founder and CEO of TheyDo. His business is based on a simple yet sometimes impossible task for large organizations: breaking down processes to make it easier for C-level executives to connect with their customers. Traditionally, small and large organizations have focused on customer journey mapping. TheyDo has a strategic focus on customer journey management, an innovative strategy that creates alignment to what the company designs versus what the customer actually experiences. This allows the organizations that Jochem and TheyDo partner with to make data-driven decisions with qualitative inputs. Betsy and Tony dive deep into this conversation with Jochem and explore what the future of the customer experience could be in the next 5-10 years: intertwining individual emotions with transactions and journeys to predict future behavior.
Fun fact: 30% of the population learns by listening. Not-so-fun fact: If your website only offers written content, you could be leaving behind a big chunk of your target market simply because you’re not speaking the same language. Meet David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices, a fast-growing online platform that connects buyers and sellers of one creative service: the human voice. He joins Betsy and Tony to share how he thinks a little differently about the customer journey and generously shares ideas for ways to improve your standing with prospects. Start by taking down the gates to your website content and determining which written content can be translated to audio. Be their guide (not the hero) in helping them achieve their goals. Thanks for your insights, David!
It all starts with a story and believe it or not, Doug Brown has a lot of them. Starting with his first job at the young age of 3 when he was sweeping floors. Many years down the road, Doug is now helping companies achieve their top 1% of sales. Join us as Betsy and Tony get Doug’s unique perspective on the state of sales today. Sure, sales people used to push back on marketing and how they didn’t need it to sell. Now, they’re pushing back on really getting to know their customers. Some of them have told Doug there’s not enough information out there to learn about their customers. Listen in to hear Doug’s response to this objection with an incredible story involving his grandfather.
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.
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.
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