The Customer of the Future – Blake Morgan

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Transcript:

Tue, 8/31 · 09:23:02 33:15

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
customer salesperson company customer experience crm blake sales people business technology product employees cares money hear loyalty experience life listening chapter

SPEAKERS
Blake Morgan and Christopher Smith

Intro
Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith, talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack. Listen to find out how the best of the best achieve success with their team and CRM technology. And remember, unless you are the lead dog, the view never changes.

Christopher Smith
Welcome to Sales Lead Dog. Today I have joining us Blake Morgan. Blake, welcome to sales lead dog.

Blake Morgan
You know, I love sales and I love dogs. So, I feel like I was meant to be on your show.

Christopher Smith
I love that, that you’re the first one that’s ever said that to me like that. That’s great. So, Blake, you’re pretty accomplished. You are a very highly rated keynote speaker. You’re an author, which we’re going to talk about here in a second. But tell me your story. How did you get where you are today?

Blake Morgan
I wanted to be somebody, I wanted to be somebody- I was nobody. And I thought this really isn’t very fun. I moved to New York City where anybody who wants to be somebody moves. I had no money. I had no job prospects; I had this measly internship. But my dreams were shattered when I realized that the print industry was no longer an easy thing that there were no jobs. And I ended up being recruited by a conference company that was really like, how can I describe it extremely intense, high turnover, really not the easiest company to work for. But I ended up thriving there. And five years later, I had my own brand, doing customer management, helping to turn an old offline conference company into a savvy hybrid digital and real-life events company. And that was 12 years ago, had my own podcast on customer experience. But we didn’t call it that we didn’t have the language. So, we call it CRM. And then I met my husband. So that was a major game changer in my life. When I was 25 years old, and I was sick of my life in New York. I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t sleeping a lot. I didn’t like the prospects there because I wanted to get married and have family. But I met my husband at a CRM conference, which he’ll appreciate in Atlanta. He was the cutest youngest guy there. We had too much in common. It was weird. He came to New York two weeks later for an event as a speaker, and we just were best friends instantly. And honestly, we’re constantly together. He saw me move to San Francisco next, be with him to be with him, and try and find jobs, and I kept failing miserably. After my five-year job in New York every startup job I had, I’ve worked for abusive, entrepreneurial, crazy town bosses. Then I worked at a corporate company. And I was laid off after two years, I just realized something’s wrong. Either I’m really messed up and I can’t have a real job. Or I don’t have the right fit for a career. And I watched my husband, I had a front seat to his success. So, I watched him become an internationally known keynote speaker. And here I am flailing working for other people being miserable. Eventually, I figured out you know, you’re a very good speaker, Jacob, my husband, you took acting classes as a teenager, but I can kind of fake my way through a speech, I can do this. He said to me, Blake, if you want what I have, if you want freedom, if you want money, if you want to be the captain of your own ship, you can work for yourself, but you have to learn how to speak in public. And I thought, Oh dear God help me it’s my worst nightmare. Here I am, seven years later and have a thriving business. And I’m doing it and I’m bringing my message that the world needs to hear. Which is that if you make customers lives easier and better, you will always have customers and that’s why I write the books. That’s why I’ve traveled the world doing my speaking events- is to bring this human message to business of treating people while caring about one another. It’s very simple, but in practice, it becomes hard for these corporations to implement. So that’s my story.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, oh, I love that. It’s a great story and that’s one of the things I love about doing the podcast is everyone has such a unique journey. It’s always wonderful to hear, you know, the backstory, what’s behind the curtain, so to speak. So, the book that we’re going to talk about today is the Customer of the Future, which is a very intriguing title. How did you come up with that title?

Blake Morgan
I knew I wanted to write about the future. And for the past 10 years, I’ve been talking about the future of, if we treat people while they come back, the technology, all this stuff, it changes it innovates. But at the heart of this is a message of treating people while making people’s lives easier and better. The customer of the future, if you write a customer experience book, you better make sure that customer experience people will recognize is for them. Because there’s a lot of books out there. So, the art of creating a title for a book, it’s actually very hard. Even if the book seems very simple, we had 20 names for the title, the customer the future, she’s already here. she expects this zero-friction seamless experience. She’s not getting one, she’s getting this disjointed, clunky experience. We have the technology we saw with COVID. We have all this technology to do all these things to make the experience easier, but we hadn’t done it- COVID forced us to get creative to create this contactless customer experience to allow our employees to work remotely, we were forced to do it. So, the customer of the future- COVID sped that up. It’s a seamless, easier digital experience. And the title I think was a good one. It resonates with people, because the customer of the future is really the customer of the present, but we can’t, we don’t see her we don’t understand how pressing it is to make life- to make it happen for her.

Christopher Smith
Yep, so the rest of the title, the 10 guiding principles for winning tomorrow’s business. We’re going to talk about three of those. If you want to hear the rest the regular the rest of the remaining seven, you got to buy the book. Okay. So, the first one- chapter one: customer experience mindset. I love how you started off this chapter you talk about 72% of companies say it is their top priority. If that’s the case, why do so how many customer experiences just like that,

Blake Morgan
You know, it’s kind of like getting in shape. Like we all want to be in shape. But when it actually comes to putting the cookie down or waking up at 5:30 to get on the treadmill. Most of us don’t want to put in the work. People hate when I use fitness and exercise analogies. But maybe because I had a baby, they’ll be nice to me and won’t allow me to do it. Because I had to get back in shape. Well, I don’t want to be insensitive. But you know, these things are hard. They’re so hard if they weren’t hard, everyone would have them. And the hard work with being a competitive company that jumps up in the morning, excited to serve the customer. There’s a lot of stuff that happens, even when we have good intention. So good intentions are important. But what happens when oh my gosh, it’s gonna cost $2,000 to deliver that peloton, treadmill to that customer. Four weeks earlier than we had said, because she has a wedding she needs to get in shape for or this dog food delivery. It is the bag came ripped and our customer Chris with his dog, Athena (that’s the name of my dog so I can remember that), you know, they’re very disappointed that the bag was ripped. So, what are we going to do for them to fix this, okay, that’s going to cost money, or our truck driver is going to have to drive back out to wherever. So, you see that in theory, it’s easy to say the customer is the heart of everything we do. But what does that look like when we make decisions across the entire company, the customer gets lost, you got to make money now, we got to make our board happy short-term profits. All these things get in the way legacy bureaucracy. These islands we sit on, I used to work at a fortune 100 company, no one talked to each other, we all hoarded our data and work toward these monthly performance metrics that really weren’t in line with customer experience. So, there’s a couple things to remember from what I’m saying. One is that is the customer-the center of everything that you do across the company in every meeting that is not easy to do. The second thing is what metrics are we holding ourselves to because everyone listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube? Those of us that have jobs, we’re so blessed to have jobs, but we have to know if we’re being successful if you treasure something you’ll measure it what’s measured gets improved these are very age-old adage is what are we measuring? The things that we measure that’s what we’re our employees are gonna work towards. We can’t get mad at our employees if like if the folks listening to this podcast are in sales, if we only incentivize our sales people to make more sales and make as much money as possible, and customers that are longtime customers get treated bad and we’re not incentivizing salespeople to go the extra mile for all customers, we can’t get mad at our salespeople, because we created that by not focusing on the right metrics. So, a couple things is it’s very hard to make the customer focus of everything you do. How do we scale that across the company? Most companies don’t do that. Well, they’re too siloed to even begin. And then we’re measuring the wrong things as far as what our employees are doing.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, you talk about that in the book about that. You mentioned that a little bit what you just said that we’re so focused on the short term, we forget that it’s all about creating that brand loyalty, that you know that that loyalty that goes beyond this transaction to where we’re gonna get, you know, long term have that long term relationship and those follow on transactions.

Blake Morgan
Well, loyalty died during COVID. Because people like me, I had a baby during COVID. Do you think I cared about loyalty? Absolutely not. I was going to go with safety, efficiency, convenience, loyalty? No, thank you don’t care about that. And so we see in tough times, customers are much more picky. They’re very happy to abandon the companies they’ve done business with for years. It’s really about Darwinism. What are the companies that are innovating to serve a customer that is stressed out that is terrified of getting COVID it’s really only about innovation, about standing out by working harder on customer experience. And I think that’s what matters most is understanding that customers today are not as loyal as they were because we’re in unprecedented times, we’re still dealing with COVID and delta. And the companies that want to win today cannot rest. They have to continue to iterate and pivot and shift with these very challenging realities.

Christopher Smith
But you got to do what you can to protect that loyalty though, whatever you do have right in terms of like, through innovation through that intense focus on the customer experience that you know, that takes into account like you’re saying the fear people have or their personal situations that you know, I just had a baby and I don’t want to leave my house I don’t want to expose my child to whatever having that level of understanding it takes that having that connection and understanding what the customer… How do you know what customer- what companies do this? Well, what companies do a good job of customer experience?

Blake Morgan
Yeah, so some companies have an incredible product that’s very relevant. Like peloton, they have an incredible product it’s extremely well done. It’s very modern. It’s convenient, amazing user interface, amazing personalization, quality of the bike. The peloton is this bike that basically you can take a spin class from the comfort of your own home gym. However, I’ve heard sometimes you know, service can be delayed, getting the bike needs a light see what Tesla like another incredible product. And I’m saying this just from what I’ve heard that I think peloton is a very innovative company, I’ve actually never had a problem with the bike. So, I can’t say the service is bad. I have heard unfortunately, I love to talk about Tesla, because they are doing so much right with, to me the modern customer experience. The product is incredible. The product runs the car runs on a computer on a tablet, this is incredible. Little things in the car that are just amazing. Like you don’t need to use the brake and everything is personalized to you. So, the dashboard when you Chris, get in the car, it knows it’s Chris not Blake in the front driver’s seat. So, everything shifts according to knowing that it’s you there, the music, the podcasts, all the settings, unique settings you have on how you like to drive the car. Unfortunately, with Tesla, I’ve heard the service, it’s very hard to get a hold of a person on the phone. And it’s very slow to get the service, there’s delays in shipping the car. So sometimes you have an incredible product, even Tesla, the ideas there where it’s updating itself through the cloud. So, you don’t need to even get the car serviced as much unless there’s a real problem. However, the certain things with Tesla, it’s like the company is so cool and so hot and so tech forward that they don’t have to work as hard as another company that staffs up more. Something that’s happened during COVID that I want every company listening to this podcast to be aware of is this whole due to COVID your average wait time is expected 45 to 60 minutes. This is not acceptable. If you call your company’s contact center and there’s a lame excuse about COVID and you can’t get the staff- Oh dear God just kill me. Do not release this to customers. All it says is that you’re cheap. You don’t want to spend the money on staffing and you’re using COVID as an excuse. We know that winners in life, you got to get things done. There’s no excuse. No one cares why you couldn’t deliver you either deliver or you don’t. And COVID has really made it clear the companies that have made customer experience a priority, and are not making lame excuses to customers as to why they should be okay with being treated badly.

Christopher Smith
I couldn’t agree more. You know, it’s just such a cop out, I think, to sit there and blame it on COVID. Chapter Three, developing customer focused leadership. As a sales leader, what’s my role in developing customer experience?

Blake Morgan
Sales are incredibly important. You’re in charge of relationships, Chris, you are in charge of getting people to trust you, telling them about the product, making them excited, helping them understand the value, very, very important part, but increasingly, the sales with technology, what is the role of the sales person? Is it does it just stop when you sell them the product? Or are you also in service to constantly add value to check in with the customer to make sure they’re happy. And I think that is probably a big mistake that salespeople make is that they think once they sell the product, they’re done. But really, if we want to retain customers, sales people are in front of customers have so much rich knowledge about how they can make the experience better. So that is so important, as we think about the evolving role of the salesperson, customer focus sales leadership, we don’t just stop when we make the transaction. We don’t treat customers like wallets. We’re following through to the entire journey, continuing to check in with them, making sure they’re happy, comfortable, and then providing feedback to engineering, or the product creators to say, oh, John, from Kentucky is having this issue with the product, I think we should go back and fix it. Because I’m sure if John is suffering, then other customers are suffering. So, it’s this loop that we’ve been talking about for so many years that the salespeople can be a really important part of. And now like when I even go into a retail store, when I do, I expect a lot of personalization. Expect attention like Sephora does this really well. When you walk into a Sephora, they check on you. They have a team with walkie talkies, all tracking customers around the store, every customer gets greeted every time. And you get a lot of personalized attention. With COVID it’s still hard, but they’re making it happen. And I think that’s what customers expect. They expect a salesperson that personalizes the experience- that cares. And then the salesperson follows through not just after selling the product, but continues to check in with them. Do you know what that does? Christopher to the salesperson?

Christopher Smith
They have to work they have to be engaged, right?

Blake Morgan
Yeah, but it also gives them a chance to sell more product down the road. Oh, I like that product. Like that’s for the makeup retailer. I like that product. But now it’s a different season, I’m having dry skin or I’m going to a wedding. I don’t know what kind of look I want. Can you give me some advice? Do you know how much we’re all craving that attention right now because of COVID? So, the winnings go to the salesperson that is willing to work hard to be organized to use data to personalize, they will bring in so much more money than the salesperson that just wants to check the boxes move on.

Christopher Smith
Oh, you know, there’s a local furniture store here that my wife and I went in. Because of the experience we had with one particular salesperson that’s a very large place lots of salespeople. We asked for this individual by name. If he’s not there. We’ll leave them we’ll come back when he’s working.

Blake Morgan
Where are you? Where do you live?

Christopher Smith
We’re in Denver. And it’s just we know we’re going to get a great experience. He’s going to tell us Oh, no, you don’t… I wouldn’t recommend that. I really think you should look at this instead. We trust them. No, and he’s not just shilling product. He really wants us to have you know that when we bring it home, we’re going to be happy. And having that level of trust. That means something.

Blake Morgan
Yes, we just moved to LA and actually a lot of our friends moved from the Bay Area to Denver, we moved to LA to be near the grandparents. And it’s interesting to walk into stores and you see the variation in customer experience in some one store called it there’s one called the Joneses in LA you have an appointment to go in. But you get this level of personalization that is really incredible. And then other stores you walk in, they hardly greet you, they hardly look at you. You spend way less money it’s just like obvious but in the culture of these companies. You can see the sales leadership even just with how the employees on the floor. Because they say culture is what happens when no one is looking, training, having energy, big energy, making leadership, making employees realize this is important. Every moment is important. Every customer is important. Rather than, yeah, you can be on your phone while you’re at work, just sort of open the doors, turn the lights on, I mean, those companies are going to go out of business. Because I mean, if you think of even furniture, it’s interesting to me as a customer, because I am furnishing a new house. And I’m either going schlepping, somewhere going in there and having that experience, or I’m going on my phone and going on Wayfair and getting a much cheaper product that ships quickly. Customer Service, digital service is so efficient. And for these old furniture retailers to compete with like a Wayfair. Oh, man, I’m scared for them.

Christopher Smith
Oh, yeah, totally. It’s crazy. You know, one of the things that I wanted to ask you, when you started chapter three, you tell a story about a company you used to work and we had the same when there’s a problem don’t look up. Yeah, I love that. What a great way to start and set the tone for the chapter. How do I know as a sales leader, that’s a problem in my organization? What should I be looking for? To find out? If that’s the way our company is?

Blake Morgan
Yeah, thank you, Chris, for reading my book, that means so much to me, everybody who hasn’t read it, he’s referring to a fortune 100 company worked out when things go wrong. They told employees don’t look up. So don’t look to your boss to fix it. Don’t look to management. And I believe that we’re in really complicated times, and leadership should be visible, should be reachable. And we need transformational leaders. So that are there. And this culture of this company was just so strange. Even my boss, I always felt like I was a burden when I asked when I needed help. And I really didn’t know what to do. And I always felt directionless. So, these big corporations, we want employees to make change to get things done. But we also provide so little direction time. You know why? Chris, you know why we do this? We have our managers doing so much work. They don’t have time to be people, leaders, because we’re thinking, okay, you sell and you spend all your time producing, but also can you take care of these 10 people, and also have time to exercise and feed yourself and your family and blah, blah, blah, like where it’s not realistic. And honestly, I got out of the game I got out of corporate because I just thought, oh, this is not an experience that I want to have. Right? Not every company is like this. But the don’t look up thing really bothered me that you should just be able to just do everything by yourself. I think that the best companies allow employees, they have an open-door policy. Employees can go tell any manager anything, because the low-level employees are often the ones who have this knowledge about bad things that are happening, or potential risks. And if you have a fear culture or culture where don’t bother leadership because they’re too busy in their ivory tower. This is not the modern company.

Christopher Smith
No, I agree. It’s that mentality boggles my mind. Honestly. You know, you would think, you know, organizations to be smarter than that. As a sales leader, how should I be coaching my team to have that customer experience mindset?

Blake Morgan
Customer experience is really simple. It’s about one thing- listening. So, if your salespeople spend a lot of time talking to customers, listening to them, and then doing something with that feedback, these leaders, these sales leaders will be so far ahead of anyone else. Just taking the time listening, doing something with that information. Imagine how much better your product and service will be when you actually get the feedback from the horse’s mouth to tell you here’s what you could be doing better.

Christopher Smith
No, it’s so true. Transitioning to chapter six, which you know my business we implement CRM, chapter six is customer experience technology and you know, whenever I’m selling CRM a big part of what I talk about when I’m trying to learn about the organization is what is their sales process does it end when the deal is closed? We were talking about this earlier you know that and it’s interesting how many companies when they’re picking out technology their focuses okay with this is CRM for the sales team. And we’re gonna stop tracking anything in CRM once the deal is closed. And unless the question well, okay, that’s this much of your you know, the customer experience now you got to deliver which is this much you know, for those people out there listening. Now I’ve got my hand spread really far apart. You’re not watching on YouTube, you have no idea what I’m doing. But, you know, it’s that once you’ve sold, that’s really when the experience begins. What are you doing to support that with technology? Can you talk about the role of technology and customer experience?

Blake Morgan
The most customer focused companies today are very data driven. So, they don’t just track data, but they do something with it. Okay, what’s happening with our customers, they’re taking our product, they’re using it for a year, and then we don’t hear from them. You should be interested to know where they’re going, what’s going wrong, what’s going right. And yes, CRM should not absolutely not just be for acquiring the customer. Because I’m going to even think about patient experience would not be horrible if hospitals only cared about acquisition. And then who cares when Blake or her family needs special treatment, or her patient records in any business can learn from or imagine themselves as a healthcare institution, where they constantly the customer constantly needs attention needs to be checked in on and it’s not just good for the customer. And their experience is good for business, because, ultimately, eventually live our lives change, or realities change and we need something else. So, are you going to be there? And if you’re not your competitor definitely will be. So yes, CRM and technology, it should definitely not just be for acquisition, you can think of your customers like that. They might have 10 different life kind of seasons, while they’re with you, even from an insurance perspective, we sell customers insurance, we often don’t talk to them even more than once a year. So, we have no idea if their lives change, we have no idea if they moved, or had a baby, or their child is now driving and needs insurance. So, it’s very important to have a good CRM and constantly check in on customers and keep our data clean. So, we can depend on it and use it to change our approach.

Christopher Smith
You know, there are certain industries like that I, as you were talking, I was thinking about that. They are so not proactive in managing the customer relationship. They’re very transactional. And they just expect you to keep coming back to them. It’s mind boggling. What advice do you have for, you know, if I own one, I’m listening, and I’ve got one of those business or I’m thinking, Oh, crap, that’s me. What advice do you have for those people?

Blake Morgan
My advice is to know your weaknesses. So, ask your customers, what could we be doing better. And don’t be afraid to hear that, even though it can hurt to get negative feedback, and just be very hungry to do better. Because the minute we stopped being interested in how we can improve as people and as businesses, that’s the beginning of the end. So, we always have to be on a growth path. And if we’re not growing, we’re dying. So, if you’re interested in living, thriving, succeeding as a human, or as a business person, we constantly have to be interested in how to do better. Even for me, I’m always working on myself, I was just in I have a coach for my speaking business. I’m, you know, I have a coach at the gym, I’m always just pushing myself. And I always try and hang out with people that are smarter than me. And because I always want to be improving and learning. And that’s the only reason I’m surviving. And I think the minute we stopped caring about how to do better, and we get bored, or tired, that’s a moment to take a pause and say, okay, something’s not right. And it sounds like they’re like a very anxious approach to life. But the truth is, life is always changing and evolving, and we have to be open to growth, or else. We know it’s not good.

Christopher Smith
Yeah. You know, what, you had an interesting line in chapter six, that really resonated with me that it basically to sum up is technology needs to be part of your customer experience strategy, which really, that resonated with me personally, that I think a lot of people were picking out a CRM because we want to start sales or support our sales teams better. Or we’re going to buy any RP because we want our operations team to be able to have better data or whatever, but those to me, I’ve never heard anybody really talk about, hey, we’re buying this because we want to improve the customer experience. Wow, that’s scary. Yeah. What about I mean, what’s your perspective on that?

Blake Morgan
There’s a lot of innovation. Now with technology even if you think of yourself as a customer, imagine the last transaction you had with an e-commerce company. Now we have even voice dictation on our watch. So, some companies like Rocky’s shoes You can shop for the shoes through the voice dictation or make changes or have a customer service interaction. So, it’s always about making the customers life easier and better. Technology can be a great help in doing that. And if you’re not in the business of making customers lives easier and better, then you won’t be in business for a long time. So, these companies that are very much, that’s the big issue, actually, that you’re describing right now, that’s the big misstep is that we are so often so internally focused, we have our own jargon, our own language, if a customer came and sat in on an internal meeting, their eyes would be crossed, they wouldn’t understand. So, we have to get out of our own way, get out of our own heads and understand that the technology should not just be purchased for technology’s sake, it should really have a palpable impact on customer experience.

Christopher Smith
Like, it’s been great. We’re coming up on our time here on Sales Lead Dog, it’s been great listening to you. The name of the book is the Customer of the Future. It’s available on Amazon. You also what is your other book, you want to talk about your other book as well?

Blake Morgan
Yeah, my first book was called More is More. And it’s really an introduction to customer experience, how the best companies work hard, harder, and go further to create knock your socks off customer experiences. It’s always about hard work up front to enjoy life later. It’s all it’s like how we all are in our personal lives. It’s the same as in business. We can work hard now to create better experiences for our customers later. Or we can learn the hard way when our customers leave us and have to play catch up. So, it’s really an approach to life about being proactive, hungry, willing to hear the hard things excited to work on ourselves and our businesses. And it’s to me, it’s a mindset that is more helpful, because if you work harder now, I mean, wouldn’t you want to make your future self, make their life easier? I certainly would for myself. And so, it’s the same with business. We can do a good job now and then later, we’ll have more customers and it’ll be easier.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, I love it. Blake again, thank you for coming on Sales Lead Dog. We’re gonna have all of Blake’s contact info on in our show notes. So, you can check that out there. But Blake, if people want to reach out- connect, they want to learn more about your speaking engagements or just connect with you in general? What’s the best way for them to do that?

Blake Morgan
Yeah, I would love for folks to find me on LinkedIn. Or visit me Blake. Michelle Morgan.com. Thank you so much, Chris. I really enjoyed your questions and I wish you the best. Thank you.

Outro
As we end this discussion on Sales Lead Dog, be sure to subscribe to catch all our episodes on social media. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Watch the videos on YouTube. And you can also find our episodes on our website at empellorcrm.com/sales leaddog. Sales Lead Dog is supported by Empellor CRM, delivering objectively better CRM for business guaranteed

 

Quotes

 

Links

Blake Morgan LinkedIn
The Customer of the Future Course on LinkedIn
Blake Morgan Website
Blake Morgan Twitter

Empellor CRM LinkedIn
Empellor CRM Website
Empellor CRM Twitter